That’s right. All you WP 2.1.1 users who went to all the trouble to upgrade just a short time ago now need to upgrade urgently. Notification (Courtesy of John Chow) included the following warning:

Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.

Longer explanation: This morning we received a note to our security mailing address about unusual and highly exploitable code in WordPress. The issue was investigated, and it appeared that the 2.1.1 download had been modified from its original code. We took the website down immediately to investigate what happened.

It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file. We have locked down that server for further forensics, but at this time it appears that the 2.1.1 download was the only thing touched by the attack. They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution.

I didn’t upgrade to 2.1.1 as I’m still on the old branch of WP! I had just upgraded to the latest version of that when 2.1 was released to my surprise! I was just too lazy then. Now, I’m wondering: with 2.1.2 out already, upgrading should be soon. It’s just so much trouble upgrading, that I’ll think I’ll just upgrade the necessary files, file by file. I have so many plugins, downloads, a theme that is tweaked beyond easy redoing… I hate upgrading… Anyway, that is no excuse: I have to bite the bullet.