A vulnerability in the Snoopy library was announced today.  WordPress uses Snoopy to fetch the feeds shown in the Dashboard.   Although this seems to be a low risk vulnerability for WordPress users, we wanted to get an update out immediately.  2.6.3 is available for download right now.  If you don’t want to download the whole release to get the security fix, you can download the following two files and copy them over your 2.6.2 installation.

1. wp-includes/class-snoopy.php
2. wp-includes/version.php

With WordPress 2.7 coming down the tubes, this may well be the last WordPress update you install manually but as the dashboard shows that there’s a new version available, this may cause a number of people to download it, even if it is a minor update. You can’t really help it, almost like grabbing at a bunch of promotional pens just because they’re there. The next version of WordPress though should make is much easier to update, so there will be no reason not to have the latest build really. I must say, it does make things easier from a PC support perspective when you can easily keep your software up-to-date. It does eliminate any problems caused by old or incompatible versions of software trying to live with other pacakges.