WordPress hacked
By Pulkit Sharma

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms admired not only for its quality and innovative features, but also for protecting bloggers. In 2008, China offered it a deal. Toe the official line by censoring Tibet and human rights and handover details of dissidents, and we will allow WordPress to do business in China.

WordPress boss Matt Mullenweg stood up to China and told reporters: “I started thinking about the DNA of the company. That sort of company is not one I would wake up every day and feel passionate about working in.”.  This courageous stand against China won WordPress millions of fans in the blogging community.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg even flew to India in 2009 to attend the first WordPress camp which was part of the birthday celebrations of the Delhi Bloggers Bloc.

WordPress also hosts a number of VIP blogs including Om Malik’s GigaOm, CNN’S Political Ticker, Dow Jones All Things Digital, BBC’s Top Gear and many others.

WordPress has made public on April 14, 2011 (India time) about a high level hacking attack on some of its computers

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Tough note to communicate today: Automattic had a low-level (root) break-in to several of our servers, and potentially anything on those servers could have been revealed.

We have been diligently reviewing logs and records about the break-in to determine the extent of the information exposed, and re-securing avenues used to gain access. We presume our source code was exposed and copied. While much of our code is Open Source, there are sensitive bits of our and our partners’ code. Beyond that, however, it appears information disclosed was limited.

Based on what we’ve found, we don’t have any specific suggestions for our users beyond reiterating these security fundamentals:

- Use a strong password, meaning something random with numbers and punctuation.
- Use different passwords for different sites.
- If you have used the same password on different sites, switch it to something more secure. (Tools like 1Password, LastPass, and KeePass make it easy to keep track of different unique logins.)

Our investigation into this matter is ongoing and will take time to complete. As I said above, we’ve taken comprehensive steps to prevent an incident like this from occurring again.
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