03 Feb

WordPress vulnerabilities. are you affected? read on!

Wow!.. what a start to the new year its been!

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, the impact of Donald Trump as President has been and will continue to cause waves all over the world, not the least has been his latest venture into preventing immigrants with green cards from re-entering the US which has caused bedlam within the IT industry as well as many other industries, who employ a lot of overseas workers. Hopefully the US will sort itself out and some normality will return to our day to day operations, as currently there is a lot of market uncertainty.

Getting back to specific IT news though, vulnerabilities seem to be a constant problem for everyone these days. You’d notice all the Microsoft Updates that get applied to your machines on a regular basis to fix bugs and security problems, but what about other applications and even your website? They are not automatic, and need to be manually updated to fix any issues. Unfortunately most software vendors don’t maintain up-to-date mailing lists and/or don’t notify their users of problems until its too late.

One such thing that has come across my inbox this last week has been a MAJOR vulnerability with WordPress (which is website software that a LOT of companies (like EtherTech) use to run their websites).

The release states :

HOMELAND SECURITY – US-CERT
National Cyber Awareness System:
WordPress Releases Security Update
01/26/2017 10:25 PM EST

Original release date: January 26, 2017 | Last revised: February 01, 2017

WordPress 4.7.1 and prior versions are affected by multiple vulnerabilities. A remote attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected website.

On February 1, WordPress disclosed an additional vulnerability that is fixed in version 4.7.2.

US-CERT encourages users and administrators to review the WordPress Security Release and upgrade to WordPress 4.7.2.

If you currently have a website that uses wordpress you need to get this addresses pretty quickly before your site is attacked and/or hacked.

If you need help doing these upgrades EtherTech can advise and perform upgrades to sites that use wordpress and associated plugins. (normal hourly rates apply) for you. We can also setup regular maintenance for these sites if required (as we’ve found most web designers simply design the site, get the money and that’s it. They never update it ever again. Please give us a call.

Office365.

If you’re currently running on an alternative mail system to Office365, please give us a call and let us discuss with you the benefits and potential cost savings you can make by switching to Office365.
For example, we recently switched on of clients with 40 mailboxes to office365 and after all the migration costs and our costs and office365 licensing costs they have a ROI of 3 years, then save approx. $3600 a year ongoing plus they have access to the latest Office applications and the extra Microsoft applications and features. Call us for a meeting and a quote!

Please give us a call anytime on 1300-ETHERTECH!

Until next time!

[wpsr_button id=”9370″]