SM2? Pingbacks? - Impressive Leonard, sounds like you’re in the wrong bus. 
Watchout for the older WordPress carousel Len.
I have had 2 warnings this week.
I did have a Wordpress site that was short lived and walked away from the host losing some big dollars.
Best regards len.
Good to see you back in good standings.
Not using Wordpress.com, I’m using a VPS with Wordpress open-source. I keep it up to date, (Currently Version 4) and as I have had the luxury of a dual career (I.T security being the first, Construction/Inspection being the second) I think I’m probably more aware than most of the issues.
I regularly update some of the plugins myself, as I find security and operation bugs in them, and most of my own sites are so heavily modified, I couldn’t use the off-the-shelf updates if I wanted to.
You also have to be careful in all the Open-Source platforms for 3rd party plugins or mods. Some are built deliberately to expose information. We test all the plugins for things like that. Proprietary products have the same issues. InterNACHI use a combination of vBulletin (paid solution), Wordpress and Drupal for it’s services, and we have all experience the levels of SPAM that come from some of our submissions here.
We also saw an uptick in SPAM when I registered on some other vBulletin sites (xda-developers, realestatewebmaster, activerain etc.) This is the downside of interconnection, it is inherently insecure in the transport mechanism in open-source and web-world because there are no enforced standards.
That’s why I have personally offered advice FOC for others wishing to take the non-cloud route to building their own websites.
For those who are confused with some of the terms I’ve used:
SEO - Search Engine Optimisation: Otherwise known as guessing what someone is going to type into a search engine to find your site (in Google/Yahoo etc) and making sure your posts have an adequate amount of those terms in them, (along with some other rules for being accepted by Search Engine Analysis services)
SM2 - Social Media Marketing: Alternatively known as making sure that when you have something to say, it’s posted to as many social sites as possible in slightly alternating formats but so that the content and comments can be attributable back to you and your services/products.
Pingbacks/Trackbacks/Feeds/XMLRPC - The mechanisms for linking the various sites together.
SPAM - Smooth Particle Applied Mechanics, A tin of meat, or that annoying C R A P that you get bombarded with everytime a government agency invents some new rule to prevent it form happening but fails to realise it could be easily fixed if they were to get the Telecomms companies to introduce proper protocols in their infrastructures.
Have fun out there.
His fallen friend likes to insure “a knife to the back” of our associations and everyone that promotes their CMI.
It’s not about the toys, tools, gimmicks, or tricks, it’s about education/knowledge/customer service. I’ve been a NACHI member since '04, and a CMI for a while. Your reputation is not the main thing, it’s the ONLY thing!! THANKS, NICK… NACHI is the reason for my success!