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Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Friday January 29th. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com. To hear the podcast click on the arrow below:

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems in the world. It’s the system behind blogs by individuals, large news organizations and some e-commerce stores. That makes it a target for cybercrooks. This week Wordfence, a provider of security protection for WordPress, issued a report…

Should WordPress notify users of plugin ownership changes? That was the question that Ian Atkins asked two months ago. WP Tavern readers seemed to think it was a good idea, at least those who commented on our coverage of it. However, the original Trac ticket has not seen any movement since.

There are real technical issues with automating the process. A change of ownership does not necessarily equate to a change of the plugin author. This is often the case when someone acquires a company and maintains the brand.

Tracking such changes does not necessarily need to go through…

Pirated (aka nulled) themes and plugins were the most common source of malware infections on WordPress sites in 2020, according to Wordfence, a provider of website application firewall (WAF) solutions for WordPress sites.

The security firm said its malware scanner detected more than 70 million malicious files on more than 1.2 million WordPress sites in 2020.

“Overall, the Wordfence scanner found malware originating from a…

On Monday, Automattic announced its Blank Canvas theme on WordPress.com. The goal is to allow end-users to build single-page websites, such as an “about me” or product landing page.

Blank Canvas is a child theme of Seedlet, which Automattic’s Theme Team has been using as a launchpad. One example is its recently-released Spearhead child theme. It also provided the foundational work for the recent Twenty Twenty-One default WordPress theme.

One-page themes are nothing new. Theme builders have been releasing them for years in various…

WordPress’ plugin team has publsihed a statement regarding plugins making changes to users’ update services:

Unless your plugin has the purpose of managing updates, you must not change the defaults of WordPress’ update settings.

You may offer a feature to auto-update, but it has to honor the core settings. This means if someone has set their site to “Never update any of my plugins or themes” you are not to change those for them unless they opt-in and request it.

The statement was prompted by plugins overstepping this boundary, which, up until recently, has…

If you want to grow your online business, or just your digital presence, you can’t ignore your website’s analytics. You can hook up your WordPress site to Google Analytics but you then have to make sense of all the data that’s now coming your way.

Thankfully, there’s a raft of plugins whose purpose is to do just that – and we’ve gathered five of the best ones out there.

If you want to grow your online business, or just your digital presence, you can’t ignore your website’s analytics. You can hook up your WordPress site to Google Analytics but you then have to make sense of all the data that’s now coming your way.

Thankfully, there’s a raft of plugins whose purpose is to do just that – and we’ve gathered five of the best ones out there.

If you want to grow your online business, or just your digital presence, you can’t ignore your website’s analytics. You can hook up your WordPress site to Google Analytics but you then have to make sense of all the data that’s now coming your way.

Thankfully, there’s a raft of plugins whose purpose is to do just that – and we’ve gathered five of the best ones out there.