full-disclosure - WordPress DB Dump

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Date: Fri, 13 May 2011 10:07:36 -0500
From: John Jacobs <flamdugen@...mail.com>
To: <full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk>
Subject: WordPress DB Dump - "Spammers Delight"

Hello FD,

There appear to be multiple WordPress powered sites that are performing 
an DB->XML dumb of the articles and subsequent pages.  The comments 
section includes originating IP address, datetime, E-Mail address, 
homepage, etc.  These entities are traditionally not exposed to the anonymous 
Internet via WordPress.  Since the XML dump is structured it's quite easy to harvest 
this data.

More alarming is the volume of sites freely exposing this.  I'm not certain of the 
root cause but perhaps it's related to an upgrade procedure.  Google is happily 
indexing and caching these dumps as it appears they're created in the 
attachment system (URI ?attachment_id=\d+) with an HREF to the actual 
dump.

A simple Google search below will return a multitude of sites.  Perhaps 
someone on the WordPress side can comment on this behavior?

Google Query - inurl:uploads ".xml_.txt" wordpress

Another tasty query seems to be harvest of the MySQL database backup:

Google Query - inurl:uploads ".sql.txt" wordpress

Finally, I don't use WordPress so I really can't comment on severity.  At a minimum I believe this violates an implied level of privacy when commenting on articles powered by WordPress -- the E-Mail address and IP information is exposed in these DB dumps.

Cheers,

John "Be Nice" Jacobs

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