When it comes to actually trying to improve the poor state of web security one of the big impediments are security journalists, who often act not as journalists, but as stenographers repeating claims made by security companies with little concern for their accuracy or actual significance. A case in point with that comes from  a post from ZDNet’s Zero Day blog (which at least in the past was run by people that didn’t even understand what a zero-day is), titled “Thousands of WordPress sites backdoored with malicious code”, which we got notified due to a Google alert we have set related to WordPress plugin vulnerabilities.

It is not clear exactly how many websites are running WordPress, but one figure put out by Forbes was 75 million, so thousands of websites running it being hacked seems less than significant. In fact there doesn’t really seem to be anything significant about what is being described in the post. The problem with covering things like that is that it gives an inaccurate picture of security of WordPress, since certainly many more than thousands of website not running WordPress are also hacked each month and this can cause people to choose less secure software to use on their website because of skewed coverage. There are also plenty of issues surrounding the security WordPress that could be covered instead of this type of thing, but journalists don’t seem to be interested in covering more significant issues. [Read more]