Ten Alleged Russian Spies Arrested In US

After a multi-year investigation, American authorities arrested ten suspected Russian spies, days after President Obama met Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and called him a "solid and reliable partner."

Bank Failures On Pace To Double 2009 Rate

A Nevada bank was shut down by federal regulators on Friday, the 83rd bank to fail in 2009. This time last year, only 40 banks had failed. Defaults on bank loans for commercial property and development are responsible for the increase rate of bank failures. The FDIC is now $20.7 billion in the red due to all of the failures. 

WordPress 3.0 Released

I upgraded my test blog to WordPress 3.0. It was a seamless one-click operation. All of the plugins I use and recommend for safety reasons have been compatible with the new version of WordPress. From a practical standpoint, I can't tell what is new to this version aside from bulk updates to plugs, even though WordPress.org claims that there are 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements as seen in the video below. However, I believe that the features will be more obvious as theme developers take advantage of the upgrades.

I don't think there is a reason to upgrade yet on your production website. It's usually a good idea to wait a point release or two (to WordPress 3.0.1 or 3.0.2) before upgrading.

BP Well Leaking 35,000-60,000 Barrels Per Day

Government scientists estimate that the blown BP well in the Gulf of Mexico is leaking 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil per day. The good news is that BP is capturing 25,000 barrels of oil everyday. That means only 10,000-35,000 barrels of oil are flowing every day into the Gulf! Hurray.

The Real Ending To Lost

Great, huh?

Failed Terrorist Arrested

"Faisal Shahzad, U.S. citizen from Pakistan, arrested in Times Square bomb case." Shahzad was arrested late Monday night at Kennedy International Airport waiting for a flight to Pakistan. The interesting bit was that he had used a disposable cellphone to buy the car but somehow investigators were able to determine his identity from that phone number.

WordPress Sites Being Hacked; Are You Safe?

Over the last few months, hundreds of Wordpress-powered websites were hacked so that they redirected readers to malware sites. This was not the result of a vulnerability with Wordpress per se. Rather, the culprit seems to be a lax file-access setting that allowed any visitor to access a file that contained database configurations, which were used to hack the website.

I have a written a brief guide on securing WordPress. Item 8 is spot on here: set your permission properly. I use WP Security Scan to make sure that all the key files are set to the strictest settings that allow WordPress to function normally. You can make the necessary changes using the File Manager on CPanel. However, take this chance to make sure that all of these security settings have been instituted on your WordPress blog.

The only additional plugin I have used since writing the previous guide is the Antivirus plugin. Unfortunately, this plugin is useful only when your blog is working perfectly. Make sure your blog is clean before installing Antivirus. Then run a manual scan. It will likely find many suspicious sections of code in your theme files, which you should designate as not a virus so they won't be flagged on a later scan. Then set the plugin to email you when it finds new suspicious code. Apparently, Antivirus would have warned infected WordPress bloggers of this new hack.