Trend Micro's Own Cybersecurity Blog Gets Hacked (silicon.co.uk)

Mickeycaskill quotes Silicon: Just to illustrate that you can never be too careful, cybersecurity specialist Trend Micro has confirmed that one of the blogs it uses to communicate with customers was itself the victim of a content spoofing attack. The culprits exploited a vulnerability in WordPress to inject fake content onto the blog before it was removed by Trend Micro and the bug fixed... "Unfortunately there are many different URLs attackers can use to carry out the same attack, so a couple of fake 'articles' ended up posted on CounterMeasures," head of security research Rik Ferguson told Silicon. "We have responded and shut down the vulnerability completely to resolve the issue."
The chairman of Trend Micro claimed in 2011 that open source software was inherently less secure than closed source -- but instead of blaming Wordpress, Ferguson "said it goes to show how breaches are an unfortunate fact of life and that companies should be judged on how they respond... 'Of course technology and best practice can mitigate the vast majority of intrusion attempts, but when one is successful, even one as low-level as this, you are more defined by how you respond than you are by the fact that it happened.'"

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Article is a bit weird - he says "there are many different URLs attackers can use to carry out the same attack", like this somehow wasn't a direct result of them not updating WordPress to the latest version after the most recent exploit was announced.

WordPress is low hanging fruit for attackers because of its vast install base; if you use it for anything that you care about you need to be totally vigilant because the 0dayz will be in the hands of everyone immediately.

I also like how he tries to deflect blame from WordPress with a nice general statement, when the real blame should be on whoever was responsible for installing it and maintaining it in the first place :)

You almost have to go out of your way to stop WordPress from auto-updating itself these days; whoever configured it probably thought they were being clever or more secure by, say, setting the file system permissions to read only. That seems like a good idea (& is mentioned in WordPress hardening guides), but unfortunately it will generally block the auto-update from working.

I would say that you're definitely more at risk from an out-of-date WP install than you are with a writeable filesystem (subject to how many plugins you're running, themes, etc). (Requiring a web-process writeable filesystem for WordPress is arguably one of its scariest requirements even though it enables a large amount of functionality.)

Overall though, I'd say this is a fairly typical worst-case scenario for a lot of people running WP in this kind of capacity. Your blog gets hacked, you serve malware or spam or look stupid for a bit, but (as long as your blog isn't where your core data is, and of course it isn't because you're not crazy, right!) you just restore from backup, update, and you're back on track.