Updates on CyberSecurity, WordPress and what we're cooking in the lab today.

If your WordPress site matters, upgrading to Wordfence Premium gives you the best protection available. And at $99 per year, it is incredibly affordable. Once you've made this great investment, there are a few things you can do to optimize your site's security....read more

I recently got a call from a friend I haven't seen for a while asking me if I'd like to grab a coffee. He had a few questions about whether WordPress is secure. I'm always looking for an excuse to visit the hip Georgetown neighborhood just south of Seattle, so I jumped at the chance. Plus Chris is an all-round awesome guy who works for a well-known social media startup, so I wanted an update!...read more

In the past few days the City of Atlanta has been hit with a ransomware attack. Several major computer systems that provide city services have been encrypted by an attacker. The attacker is demanding $51,000 worth of bitcoin to decrypt the systems, and the city has not yet ruled out paying the ransom. The attack occurred five days ago, and as of this writing, the systems remain inaccessible....read more

This question came in from Keith, a Premium Wordfence customer. We've dealt with this question a few times in different ways on the blog, but pulling it all together sounds like a great post. Let’s dive in!...read more

This is a public service announcement and a reminder to site owners. Google's Chrome browser has already started the process of ending support for Symantec SSL/TLS certificates. This includes companies owned by Symantec including Thawte, Verisign, Equifax, GeoTrust and RapidSSL....read more

At Wordfence, one of our goals is to empower you as much as possible to be self-sufficient, at no additional cost. To do that, we provide Wordfence as a free security plugin. Over the years we have also developed a comprehensive WordPress Security Learning Center that provides readers with a complete understanding of WordPress Security and how to run a secure website. We have also published a number of articles explaining how to recover from a hack, should that worst-case scenario ever arise....read more

To better protect our users' websites, we work with a lot of data from sources like our Security Services Team and the Wordfence network. We try to understand not just what attackers are doing, but also how and why. Our research into a recent campaign revealed an interesting method of attack, and contributed to the development of a new feature....read more

In the past 24 hours, Security researcher Scott Helme discovered that a third party accessibility plugin called 'Browsealoud' had their servers compromised. The plugin relies on a website including Javascript in their content in order to work. This compromise resulted in over 4,000 websites serving up cryptomining malware....read more

In mid-December we updated our Vulnerability Disclosure Policy to include Service Vulnerabilities. A service vulnerability is any issue with a technology service that represents an exploitable security risk for its users. We made this update in response to a growing trend of security issues we've been discovering in commercial services, most often WordPress hosting providers....read more

[Update at 10:50am PST: Based on the comments we've received below, it sounds like this problem only affects certain sites.  We have received several reports of successful updates, although some of these may be the hosting provider updating WordPress installs manually. Overall this looks like good news for the WordPress team who reported this as a severe bug. If you have been impacted by this, let us know in the comments.]...read more