WordPress 5.8.1 is now live and taking the fight to website vulnerabilities

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WordPress has unveiled a security and maintenance release to fix three security issues affecting versions 5.4 to 5.8 of its platform.

The fixed issues include a data exposure vulnerability within the REST API, an XSS vulnerability in the Gutenberg block editor and multiple critical vulnerabilities in the Lodash JavaScript Library.

WordPress 5.8.1 is live and available to the public, and all versions since 5.4 have also been updated to fix the mentioned vulnerabilities.

Another WordPress update

Overall, WordPress 5.8.1 release candidate one features 41 bug fixes on Core, as well as 20 bug fixes for the Block Editor. 

The release was led by WordPress staff, Jonathan Desrosiers and Evan Mullins, who in a blog post thanked all those for reporting the vulnerabilities during the WordPress 5.8 beta testing period. These alerts gave the company's security team time to fix the issues before any WordPress sites could be attacked.

Security issues explained 

A REST API is an application programming interface (API or web API) that conforms to the constraints of REST architectural style and allows for interaction with RESTful web services.

Cross-site scripting (also known as XSS) is a web security vulnerability that allows an attacker to compromise the interactions that users have with a vulnerable application.

The Lodash library was updated to version 4.17.21 in each branch to incorporate upstream security fixes.

These security vulnerabilities that were fixed is an important part of the WordPress update as it is complete outside the remit of the common maintenance updates that usually occurs. 

Abigail Opiah
B2B Editor - Web hosting & Website builders

Abigail is a B2B Editor that specializes in web hosting and website builder news, features and reviews at TechRadar Pro. She has been a B2B journalist for more than five years covering a wide range of topics in the technology sector from colocation and cloud to data centers and telecommunications. As a B2B web hosting and website builder editor, Abigail also writes how-to guides and deals for the sector, keeping up to date with the latest trends in the hosting industry. Abigail is also extremely keen on commissioning contributed content from experts in the web hosting and website builder field.