Ian Kallen on Technorati blog has posted a follow-up to their earlier post “Patch or Upgrade Your Wordpress Installation, Now” of about their decision to not index vulnerable and exploited WordPress blogs.

From the Technorati blog post:

[…]we've noticed that a large number of blogs remain vulnerable to the security issue addressed by the 2.3.3 release.

Blogs that have been compromised by this security vulnerability are typified by having links to spam destinations inserted onto the blog page. These link insertions may be invisible to casual observations; the links are often obscured by style attributes that render them invisible. These links are still seen by crawlers such as Technorati's, Google's and Yahoo's. You can find these links by viewing the source of the blog pages or, when using Firefox, looking under "Tools" —> "Page Info" —> "Links". Blogs hosted on wordpress.com are not affected by this issue; only blogs hosted on their own installations of WordPress from wordpress.org require concern.

Because of this ongoing problem, we're discontinuing processing crawls of blogs that exhibit common symptoms of being compromised. We strongly recommend upgrading your WordPress installation. Even if you haven't been afflicted by a compromise, by the time you are aware that you have been a number of negative consequences may have already occurred (for instance, flagged spam by Technorati, Google or Yahoo!) -- this has been reported by many WordPress users.[…]

This comes after the recent spat of hacks that were discovered on various high profile blogs and websites. What was even more interesting was the fact that some of these hacks and exploitations might have come from covert and encrypted code hidden in various themes available for free over the web. [WTC]

So, if you want to get your blog indexed by Technorati, it’s advised that you upgrade your blog to WordPress 2.5 ASAP.

Technorati, Blog, Blogging, WordPress, WordPress 2.5, Brecker, Indexing, Vulnerability, Exploit, Hacking