Here is my opinion on that matter. As part of the security team at WP Engine, it's not only my job to educate our users on how to better stay secure, but also figure out why their site was compromised in the first place. The majority of the time, it's because of some out of date plugin that I've never even heard of. Simply searching for "plugin + version" in Google brings up publicly known exploits.
The hardest issue, will be keeping WordPress Core up to date. It's easy if you have one website, but if you're managing hundreds, it's going to be a pain to update each manually, or even through Git/SVN. I do agree though, that WordPress needs to have an "automatic update" feature for both core, and plugins. Personally, I would rather have a broken site, than a compromised one. Both scenarios will require work to fix anyways. Our latest deployment of WordPress only broke a handful of websites (I only remember working on about 4 sites that actually had to rollback to a previous version of WordPress). That's pretty impressive.
Mostly I agree. I'm not sure there's any way for you to guarantee the security of WP as long as users can install arbitrary plugins and themes. At least as WP is currently architected.
Insofar as there's a WPEngine specific piece of this problem, it's that (IMO) you guys don't do a great job of making users understand before they install that stuff that installing it can have severe consequences. If installing arbitrary plugins is how users get their sites hacked, installing arbitrary plugins (except maybe for a few whitelisted "known good" ones) should be a Very Scary Thing, full of dire warnings you have to click through before the plugin installs. Users mostly won't understand what the warnings are saying, but most have at least been conditioned to click "Cancel" when warnings start flying.
I've talked to a lot of people who think that just moving to WPEngine has solved security for them, so they don't get how their massive collection of Super Awesome Plugins are putting them at risk. They think you all are protecting them from that. Which you can't, I know, but you can make the users understand that better.
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Here is my opinion on that matter. As part of the security team at WP Engine, it's not only my job to educate our users on how to better stay secure, but also figure out why their site was compromised in the first place. The majority of the time, it's because of some out of date plugin that I've never even heard of. Simply searching for "plugin + version" in Google brings up publicly known exploits.
The hardest issue, will be keeping WordPress Core up to date. It's easy if you have one website, but if you're managing hundreds, it's going to be a pain to update each manually, or even through Git/SVN. I do agree though, that WordPress needs to have an "automatic update" feature for both core, and plugins. Personally, I would rather have a broken site, than a compromised one. Both scenarios will require work to fix anyways. Our latest deployment of WordPress only broke a handful of websites (I only remember working on about 4 sites that actually had to rollback to a previous version of WordPress). That's pretty impressive.
Mostly I agree. I'm not sure there's any way for you to guarantee the security of WP as long as users can install arbitrary plugins and themes. At least as WP is currently architected.
Insofar as there's a WPEngine specific piece of this problem, it's that (IMO) you guys don't do a great job of making users understand before they install that stuff that installing it can have severe consequences. If installing arbitrary plugins is how users get their sites hacked, installing arbitrary plugins (except maybe for a few whitelisted "known good" ones) should be a Very Scary Thing, full of dire warnings you have to click through before the plugin installs. Users mostly won't understand what the warnings are saying, but most have at least been conditioned to click "Cancel" when warnings start flying.
I've talked to a lot of people who think that just moving to WPEngine has solved security for them, so they don't get how their massive collection of Super Awesome Plugins are putting them at risk. They think you all are protecting them from that. Which you can't, I know, but you can make the users understand that better.