That led to the development of Maximum Security for Wordpress, a plug-in that adds over a dozen security features to the blogging system, all of which are available with a click of the mouse. These include stronger password security, automated file-permission adjustments, more-effective user account controls, audit controls, and extensive logging.

The plug-in, which is currently in beta, scans themes and other add-ons for potentially malicious or dangerous code. It analyzes your site's security settings to discover weaknesses and includes a Web-application firewall and intrusion-prevention system that helps block cross-site scripting attacks, SQL injection, HTTP header manipulation, and other threats.

If you use Wordpress, head over to the Maximum Security page to sign up for the beta."

"As of Jan. 12, the latest version of the popular Wordpress blogging platform, 2.7, has been downloaded nearly 1.12 million times. Of course, being so popular makes the program a common target for the bad guys.

In the past couple of months, I've fixed at least six Wordpress blogs that were hacked. If I've repaired that many, surely a lot of other Wordpress experts have had to do the same.

The Wordpress platform is well designed, but the bad configuration habits and lack of security knowledge of users can leave a Wordpress site vulnerable to attack. In fact, this is a problem for many Web applications.

Thanks