Why WordPress Security Headlines Aren’t the Whole Story
A recent WordPress vulnerability made headlines—but the real story is how a strong security community, timely updates, and proactive maintenance keep websites protected.
If you own a WordPress site, or are involved in cybersecurity, the last week has been a busy one! That’s because of a recently discovered set of WordPress vulnerabilities that allow an anonymous user to run code on affected sites. What this means for you is that someone not logged into your website could potentially run whatever code they like on your site.
Thankfully, these vulnerabilities were not discovered by a hacker team dedicated to causing mayhem, but rather Adam Kues of Searchlight Cyber—a security researcher out of Melbourne, Australia. As is typical when WordPress vulnerabilities are discovered, his team notified WordPress and the community, and created a website checker around the vulnerability. WordPress patched it and enabled an automatic security update for all versions that were still unpatched, which fixed the issue for the majority of websites. If you’d like to verify that your site has been properly patched, Kues’ site is still up at https://wp2shell.com/ to run a check.
Why Security News Is Actually Good News
WordPress often gets a bad reputation from people who don’t understand this cycle. To an outside eye, it may seem as if WordPress is constantly in the news for hack attempts and vulnerabilities, making the entire system itself seem like a security risk. Wouldn’t it be better to stick with a codebase that wasn’t in the news?
But the reality from our perspective is quite different. It’s the community of security researchers like Kues who are out there examining the open source code for vulnerabilities that make the system more secure. With the advent of AI code agents and an ever-evolving technical ecosystem, it’s not a question of whether a system has vulnerabilities. Most do. The more important question is whether or not those vulnerabilities are discovered before they can be exploited by bad actors. A robust open source community that is constantly testing makes for a much more secure code base than one that is not.
Updates Are Preventive Maintenance
That’s not to say that there’s zero risk involved. With any codebase that has regular releases, it is possible to fall behind with your updates, which can open your site up to vulnerabilities. Much like changing the oil in your car, it’s not that you can’t let it go for a while—you can. But the longer you wait, the more you risk a catastrophic failure.
For most clients, we recommend updating your WordPress site at least once a month. This includes checking for WordPress core updates as well as checking individually for any WordPress plugins that you are using on your site.
For Rhizome maintenance clients, this update cycle is baked into your contract. We do more than just update WordPress and its plugins though. We routinely check your backups, making sure that the site can be brought back if anything does go wrong. We run full crawls of your site to identify broken links and errors, which can both be warning signs that something has failed silently in the background. We also do a visual review to check for artifacts or errors, and run our own vulnerability scans to see if any of the software on the site is currently marked as problematic. Those problems can range from an abandoned plugin to an actual vulnerability like the one mentioned above.
Peace of Mind Comes From Preparation
Even better? We maintain a WAF (Web Application Firewall) on all Rhizome sites, which means our clients were already protected against the above vulnerability even before it dropped. With that said, we still did our due diligence just the same to ensure all the sites we support got updated.
Weeks like this one remind us that no matter how it may seem, the internet is just as much an untamed wilderness as it’s always been. But with a little preparation and a knowledable partner beside you like Rhizome, there’s nothing you need to worry about.