A New WordPress Virus

Recently, we have accidentally discovered in our blog posts a new dangerous viral activity based on an advertising script that exploits the security leaks of WordPress platform. This type of attack could be also present in the tens of millions of online WordPress blogs.

The virus actions upon WordPress platform by inserting a .PHP file in the root of the installation directory and then it connects to the database. On a successful connection various blog posts are modified with long lists of spam links masked with CSS. (the visitors cannot see them, but the search engine robots index those links). As a consequence, you will have to manually check all of your posts and remove the link after the .PHP file removal. The most simple solution to check the affected posts is to create an xml file of RSS feeds from all of your posts and view them in an RSS reader. The entire article is available here http://www.downloadtube.com/blog/2008/09/12/a-new-powerful-virus-could-affect-millions-of-wordpress-blogs/.

I think this virus is for stupid WP users, if you download a plugin outside the WP site you should aways check the files.

It is true, but from our information the virus was not determined by a plugin. It was determined by an attack (SQL injection).

Any active site (php and such) will have vulnerabilities and wordpress as one could be affected by this... So altogether, sites can suffer from injection attacks, it's up to the webmaster to sift through logs and see vulnerabilities and insecure scripts or codes...

He is talking about SQL injections, I know the WP code and I'm sure that this is not true (maybe he is looking for some visitors for his blog post)

Well WordPress recently released a new version so this may have been one of the exploits fixed.

Also, MySQL injections are nothing new, but the older bugs have been fixed by now for the most part. I just hope the latest version is secure, as for malicious plugins. You should only download the ones found in the official site or the ones mentioned in well known sites. Although some lesser known plugins might actually be good and safe, but unless you're experienced it might not be wise to take chances.