The biggest battle of the WordPress security team is not against the hackers but the users of the platform itself.
Millions of them continue to run web pages in earlier versions of WorPress CMS, which often fail to protect the kernel, plugins and attack themes.
Speaking at congress for DerbyCon cyber security earlier this month, Aaron Campbell of the WordPress Security Team gave the public a picture of how WordPress has been dealing with this issue in recent years.
He described this process as a focusing rout as the WordPress team decided instead to keep the software safe with bug fixes, focus on maintaining user security through their software and their actions.
"The first thing we learned was that users are more important than software," Campbell told the audience.
The main issue is that millions of users are still using older versions of WordPress for their pages. Older versions are technically secure, but they face more risks than the most recent versions.
So after big internal discussions, the WorrdPress team decided to support these earlier versions because many users still use them. The decision also has its drawbacks as facilities with five-year security loopholes should be supported.
As a security team this is very difficult (the backport patching process).
We are trying to find ways to upgrade these versions automatically without spoiling the web pages, trying to effectively get rid of them from the internet.
One of the ways the WordPress team uses is automatic updates via a mechanism released with WPrint 3.7, 2013.
Automatic updates are enabled by default for all new installations, and appear to help keep installations in recent releases.
The WordPress team also created a notice that appears on the WordPress control panel when users use older versions of PHP.
Campbell also reported that WorPress team is working with developers of the most popular plugins, and this has produced great results as smaller additions have begun to follow (or steal) the encoding techniques used by larger projects.
So indirectly security has increased in almost all plugins.
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