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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