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Security Vulnerability In Mail-to-Blogger Passwords

In early 2010, Blogger issued a typically terse warning of a security problem, with blogs that use Mail-to-Blogger for publishing posts.
To prevent abuse, a recent update to disabled easily guessable secret words. Please update your Mail2Blogger secret word.

I've referred to the importance of the "secret word" some time ago - and apparently this year, a few blogs are being hit by the vulnerability.

If you are using Mail-to-Blogger for publishing - and especially if you enabled "Publish emails immediately" - this is a change which you need to make.

There is an organised attack technique, where blogs, owned by accounts with weak "passwords", are being used as spam hosts. In some cases, this results in splog detection, with the well known and hated in forum triage being required, to get the blog unlocked - then cleaned.

If you are inadvertently using an author account, instead of your owner account, you may have enabled Mail-to-Blogger, while trying to recover control of the blog. Whether accidentally or intentionally, your blog is now vulnerable.

If your blog uses Mail-to-Blogger (Settings - "Mobile and email" - "Posting using email"), and you have selected "Publish emails immediately", please change your Mail-to-Blogger password, to something not easily guessable - but reliable. If you don't need to post using email, select "Disabled".

Just please - do this before you have to post, following organised brute force hacking, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken
Please, help me! My blog is locked!!

Comments

Yudi said…
I have tried to disable mail to blogger.. may it works. Thank Your for your advice..
thanks for your help. I have now disabled mail2blogger.....
KOKO said…
how do we disable mail2blogger
Nitecruzr said…
Hi Habibu,

Thanks for the question.

The "Disabled" selection, for "Posting using email" will disable M2B, and make your blog safer. Or you can make the "password" a bit harder to guess, if you really want to post by email.

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