Last week, the corks popped at Automattic subsidiary Knock Knock Whois There. The 100,000th .blog domain was registered. Plus: SiteLock doubles its customer base with the acquisition of security startup Patchman. And we take another look at the dangers of cross-site scripting and show you how to protect yourself effectively.
How to prevent XSS attacks
Cross-site scripting (or XSS) is a particularly devious type of attack. This is because hackers inject code snippets into your site and can steal your customers' data, take over your site or infect your visitors' computers. All completely unnoticed and under the umbrella of your site and your visitors' trust in your offer.
And XSS vulnerabilities are also particularly common: in a study of 1,599 plugins by the security provider Wordfence, almost half of the vulnerabilities found were XSS-related.
Fortunately, the most important protective measures against this type of hack are very simple: regular updates to close security gaps and a firewall that filters out suspicious scripts. We show you what else you can do in our latest blog post.
WordPress News
International WordPress Awards
The first International WordPress Awards (IWP) are being planned. According to organizer Pragmatic, the aim of the awards is "to recognize the extraordinary effort and talent on display from thousands of WordPress developers, designers and agencies across the world". The WP community can currently vote on the award categories in a two-minute survey.
100,000th .blog domain
Knock Knock Whois There LLC - a subsidiary of Automattic - paid around 20 million US dollars for the rights to the .blog top-level domain in 2016. The 100,000th domain was recently registered. 63 percent of these were assigned by Automattic itself.
Performance News
WPMU DEV Checkup 2.0
Since the launch of the free WPMU DEV Performance Checkup six months ago, tens of thousands of analyses have been carried out. The test not only measures the performance of your WordPress site, but also provides a rating in terms of SEO and security. The new version of the test also includes accessibility recommendations. And the test results - including recommendations - can be downloaded directly as a PDF. A white label solution is also planned.
Combining work and family life with WordPress
Of course, this topic is not about the performance of a website, but about how you can improve your own everyday life and quality of life. In his podcast, Vladimir Simovic from perun.net talks about how WordPress and self-employment have helped him to combine work and family life.
Security news
SiteLock buys security startup Patchman
Security provider SiteLock has acquired the startup Patchman. The Dutch company offers security software for web hosts that automatically fixes vulnerabilities and removes malware. Before the takeover, SiteLock was used by around 2.2 million WordPress sites. The acquisition doubles the SiteLock customer base from six to 12 million websites. Four million of these run on WordPress.
5 security plugins compared
Are you looking for a firewall plugin for your WordPress site, but don't know which provider to choose? WPWarefare has looked at the pros and cons of some security plugins and created a top five list.
