Wordpress mass hacks for pagerank

Today heise security brought a news that a growing number of old wordpress installations get's misused by spammers to improve their pagerank. I've more or less waited for something like that, because it's quite obvious: If you have an automated mechanism to use security holes in a popular web application, you can search for them with a search engine (google, the mighty hacktool) and usually it's quite trivial to detect both application and version.

This isn't a wordpress-thing only, this can happen to pretty much every widespread web application. Wordpress had a lot of security issues recently and is very widespread, so it's an obvious choice. But other incidents like this will follow and future ones probably will affect more different web applications.

The conclusion is quite simple: If you're installing a web application yourself, you are responsible for it! You need to look for security updates and you need to install them, else you might be responsible for spammers actions. And there's no »nobody is interested in my little blog«-excuse, as these are not attacks against an individual page, but mass attacks.

For administrators, I wrote a little tool a while back, where I had such incidents in mind: freewvs, it checks locally on the filesystem for web applications and knows about vulnerabilities, so it'll tell you which web applications need updates. It already detects a whole bunch of apps, while more is always better and if you'd like to help, I'd gladly accept patches for more applications (the format is quite simple).

With it, server administrators can check the webroots of thier users and nag them if they have outdated cruft laying around.