WordPress 2.8.5 Out The Door

WordPress 2.8.5 has officially been tagged and is now available for download. If you don’t see the upgrade nags in your administration panel already, give it a few hours and upgrade when it becomes available. This release has been dubbed a security hardening release meaning, more preventive measures have been taken to secure WordPress. Worthy of note though is an issue that was addressed dealing with a trackback spam denial of service attack which was discussed on the WP-Hackers mailing list the other day. This exploit takes advantage of the WP-Trackback.php file which would exhaust a servers resources when used. This has specifically been addressed in 2.8.5. Thanks goes out to Steve Fortuna for releasing a fix to this 0 day exploit. The release also contains a few bug fixes as well.