A forum thread titled Thesis hacked at the WordPress Tavern Forum caught my attention. I was unpleasantly surprised that to hear that the Thesis Theme has been hacked and some malicious codes have been inserted to into the download file. The said hack is presently being hotly discussed in twitter #thesiswp
The tweets however, it has somewhat turned into a discussion about the GPL licensing issue between Matt and the Thesis developers. These two have been at loggerheads over this issue for years. Frankly, I do not know who to side, so I reserve my opinions.
(also read - Jane On WordPress)
Back to the Thesis hack. It is not a hack per se as the hacker apparently did not intend to screw up the server or anything and the only thing it seems they did was inserted a “base64_decode” string into the download file. For those in the know will be able to decode quite easily. Those who are are not that savvy will continue to live in ignorant bliss.
The affected downloads are the present Thesis 1.7 version and the latest release, Thesis 1.8 beta which is only available for developers.
This news is definitely going to affect the over all sales of the Thesis Theme temporary, at least till the developers makes an official statement that everything has been cleansed out. For those who has intentions to purchase the Theme, just hold on to your cash for a little while more. If you have already bought it, refrain from downloading just yet while things gets sorted out. I don’t think that will take too long for someone like Chris Pearson.
UPDATE: The new files on the server are clean.
Looks like I will not be meeting my targeted sales yet again of the Thesis Theme this month.
Well this is becoming like Microsoft and Windows. The more ridiculous price u put on your products the more people get pissed, the more hacking and stuff occurs.
U had an article before about a guesstimate price wasn’t it about 300$?
Nope. As predicted, the price increase did not happen but it’s not version 2 yet. They kept the latest release at version 1.8. So they can have a long way to go before they come to Version 2 and the ‘promised’ price increment. LOL.
Thesis has long been known to be crap when it comes to security:
http://technosailor.aaronbrazell.com/2010/04/07/battle-of-the-titans-premium-theme-framework-smackdown/3/
One reason why I’ll never use it or recommend it. Oh, and Pearson’s a douche
Yes well, karma I think it’s called. What goes around comes around and all that.
Hi, Costa,
I am Vedis here…
Hope you are doing great. ^.^
Need your advice, please.
I just found out that I can’t edit my blog posts. Each time I add something to the already published or old blog posts and click Update, the extra info will disappear.
I googled to find solutions, but to no avail. I wonder if it has got to do with the WordPress theme I am using. I am using Thesis 1.7.
Other blogs which I do not use this theme are fine.
Thanks for your help/advice.
Hi Vedis,
When this kind of problem occurs, 95% of the time it will be due to some incompatible plugins. Just de-activate whatever plugins you installed or updated prior to the problem. Sometimes plugins which was working fine goes bad after an update.
Hi, Costa,
You are right. ^.^
The link cloaking plugin that I used for some of my blogs caused the problem. It also caused the disappearance of posts and pages for some of my blogs this morning!!
I did the one-click upgrade a few days ago for the latest WP version without deactivating the plugins. Now I know.
Thanks for your help.