“Im getting paid!” – Websites hosted on WordPress hacked due to users’ poor password security

Millions of blogs hosted on WordPress.com can breathe a sigh of relief – although a hacker did manage to break into thousands of sites and publish a make-money-fast advert, it wasn’t because of any vulnerability on the WordPress.com site itself.

Instead, it seems users had simply been careless with their password security.

The alert was initially raised by The Hacker News (THN) and Sucuri, after some blog owners received messages from WordPress.com telling them that their passwords had been reset.

One affected WordPress.com user told THN that he had discovered hackers had published a page containing a money-making advertisement (pictured below).

A Google search for

site:wordpress.com “Im getting paid!”

finds evidence of thousands of sites that suddenly found they had unwittingly published “Im getting paid!” webpages…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.