The WordPress team has been busy these past couple of months and have been working on lots of new features for the upcoming WordPress 2.9 release. The latest WordPress 2.8.5 version that has just been released as an interim release and features a lot of the security fixes designed for WordPress 2.9. The WordPress team has decided to back-port these security fixes for existing 2.8.x users. So WordPress 2.8.5 is mainly a security fix update. It is designed to improve security on your existing blog and make everyone’s sites as secure as possible.

A few of the major changes in this release are

• A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
• Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
• Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
• Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

The WordPress team are recommending that all sites upgrade to this new version of WordPress to ensure that you have the best available protection.

Follow the link to download the latest WordPress 2.8.5 version.