Everyone has accepted the notion that everything on the Internet is “free”. Nothing in life is free – it’s just the costs are hidden in different ways.
This blog software (WordPress) is “free”. It leaks information to third parties on purpose about what people are talking about. When the news talks about “Internet chatter” being monitored by the government, how do you think they do that?
WordPress offers 1000s of “free” plugins to make the blog do magical things – written by third parties with varying skill levels and unknown motives.
One such plugin that deals with email (I don’t use it) had a security flaw that exposed 1.9 million blogs to be hacked.
With the Internet becoming an international battle field, this is only going to get worse. For the last 15 years, I don’t allow people from Europe and Asia to even see the web site, or access via the TOR anonymizer or via open proxy servers – which prevents 99% of the hacking attempts.
http://www.mailpoet.com/sucuri-hack-lessons-learned/