The march towards WordPress 2.7 continues with the release of WordPress 2.6.2. The good people at WordPress are working very hard to keep the system clean and safe for all the bloggers. The new release however is released to help bloggers who allow registrations on their accounts to take advantage. Here is why you should upgrade:
With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password. The randomly generated password is not disclosed to the attacker, so this problem by itself is annoying but not a security exploit. However, this attack coupled with a weakness in the random number seeding in mt_rand() could be used to predict the randomly generated password.
Pretty nasty, isn’t it? With all these hackers out there to comprosie popular blogs, you should definitely keep up with your updates to avoid major issues. You can download WordPress 2.6.2 here.