Google Webmaster Central warns about hackable sites
Posted on October 16th, 2008 at 19:10
Google has just started testing a new service to inform webmasters that their CMS is vulnerable to security exploits. Currently they are only targetting administrators of sites running WordPress 2.1.1 but my guess is that they'll be adding support for other versions and other platforms in the future.
I hope that they'll be adding support for Drupal as well because it doesn't matter how many security issues the Drupal security team fixes, webmasters still need to install the latest security patches and upgrades to make a difference in the field.
Any initiative that helps administrators to keep their sites - running Drupal or anything else - safe is good.
I really like how they are starting to do this, only hiccup I see is that you have to be signed up for Google Webmaster Central in order to get the notification. I wonder what percentage of site owners/operators are actually registered?
If you are using drupal, the update status module is probably a better way to receive notifications of security updates. It can check the version of all modules you are running instead of just the version of core. The most severe issues usually exist in contrib modules and I don't think google will be able to detect that.
Of course, any service that encourages users to update their CMS is a good thing, as long as they provide accurate information. There are still to many people who never update.
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