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WordPress Now Powers 25% of the Web
An anonymous reader writes: According to data from W3Techs one in four websites is now powered by WordPress. According to the report: "WordPress is used by 58.7% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 25.0% of all websites.” Venturebeat reports: "Today is a big day for the free and open-source content management system (CMS). To be perfectly clear, the milestone figure doesn't represent a fraction of all websites that have a CMS: WordPress now powers 25 percent of the Web.
About 95% of the WordPress sites I've run across have allowed user enumeration, exposed internal paths, or had old software that could be exploited. So...I'd probably say that "25% of all websites are WordPress" really means "at least 24% of all websites are insecure".
Is this a problem of WordPress, or just a popular CMS? If the admins aren't doing their job for WordPress, why would they start doing it for some other package?
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
>> Is this a problem of WordPress, or just a popular CMS?
User enumeration is ON by default in WordPress and it's baked into the design. (There are plug-ins to disable it but most people don't use them.) This is pretty unique among LMSs. WordPress's architecture (which allows the use of old plug-ins) also frequently seems to lead to the reintroduction of helper files that have old vulnerabilities, two of which happen to frequently be "directory browsing" or "internal path disclosure". As for keeping old software up-to-date, that's a problem that all LMS's have to deal with, but there's usually enough on these other WordPress-specific issues on a target site to give your average security person a place to dig in.
>> What is the actual risk from user enumeration, especially on a site not about a medical condition?
It can tell you whether or not the default admin user is still present. It can also suggest what some of the other admin accounts are, since they are often the lowest numbered accounts on WordPress. (e.g., if you delete default admin - user #1 - your new admin is often the name of user #2). It's also a lot of fun for social engineering, particularly if you can crack or create a "mere contributor account" and then convince one of the admins (ferreted out through user enumeration) to promote you to an editor.
(Remember that WordPress user enumeration isn't classic user enumeration, where you can simply tell if a username is in user or not - it's literally the ability to say "give me user #1, 2, 3....100".)
>> And how can it be prevented? Do you really want to allow two users to have the same username?
On a system like WordPress, you always tell the user "yep, I just created that account" during user registration but you use the email address already on file for the existing to send an alert to the first registered user saying "hey, someone just tried to recreate your account - was that you"?
>> If a user sends a private message to a nonexistent user, what error message strikes the best balance between security and usability?
Most WordPress systems I've seen don't use comments or PMs or any of that overhead - they're mostly single-user (or all admin) systems for "read only" content. In those cases (most cases?) the dial should be set to "no one needs to know the list of usernames on these systems."
If you parse the post closely you can see it's weasel worded
"WordPress is used by 58.7% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 25.0% of all websites.”
Because other CMS are complete. Wordpress relies on everything to be a plugin. Upgrade your wordpress, break the plugins your site depends on. Even if they don't break right away, there are lots of small problems that can happen later, or only under certain circumstances. Been there, done that.
Wordpress isn't a CMS for actual people to use. It's a pre-hacked system for people who like tinkering with systems. You want an actual CMS, go elsewhere, and I'm not talking about rival free software platforms.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
So popular, and yet they still haven't fixed the hugely annoying core issue of emulating magic quotes, even years after PHP itself completely threw out the feature.
WordPress is good.
Ok, stop laughing and hear me out.
We all know that with all the shitty web-cmses out there, the ones built on LAMP (PHP) are the oldest that actually have a finished and working feature set.
Show me one non-PHP CMS with the featureset of WP, Joomla, Drupal, EZ Publish or Typo 3, closed source or FOSS. You won't find any.
PHP and the CMSes built with it are at least ten years ahead of the game in the market they were built for - that's a simple fact that no one can deny.
And of those, the mess called WP is actually the best that fits every mold.
- It's primarly a blogging engine - which is what most people want and need anyway. ... and so forth ...
- It takes about 3 clicks and ten seconds to move it away from the blogging perspective to a regular web CMS.
- It's dead simple to install.
- It uses the hook model (also found in Drupal) to implement features that can be applied flexibly. And while that principle is questionable at best - especially from a performance standpoint - there is no doubt that it is *very* easy to use to implement custom features and setups.
- The documentation actually exisits and is pretty good.
- The community is massive. It's basically an army of tinkerers fiddling away at extensions and plugins.
- It has an official full blown mobile management app downloadable for free.
- It has a large, semi-post-capitalistic hip company baking it and it's development. (They all work remote, from around the planet and put their money where their mouths are.)
- There are popular WP plugins built by people who can't programm - but they work (sort of) and are installed/activated/deactivated/uninstalled within seconds.
- The architecture is a bizar convoluted shoddy mess. But you can start tinkering with it within minutes and won't feel bad about it - because, hey, guess what, it's a mess already.
- Modifying templates and themes in a non-destuctive update-safe manner is dead simple.
In an nutshell:
WordPress is PHPs philosophy carried 1on1 into the application/CMS layer.
That is why it's so successful.
And rightfully so.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca