Wordpress & Joomla Websites Get Hacked.
Why You Shouldn't Trust an Open Source System For Your Business!

I'm speaking here from personal experience, recent experience helping a client who had set up some Wordpress websites for SEO. He was panicking as his hosting provider was going to suspend his account, his whole account if he didn't fix it.

The message read:

"During a routine audit of our outbound mail relays, a large volume of spam was found

to be originating from a script or scripts on one or more of your websites"

***** Failure to resolve and upgrade your Wordpress version to 3.3.1

will result in suspension within 24 hours of this notice being generated. *****

The trouble is: upgrading your Wordpress or Joomla site to the next version is not always as easy as it sounds

As hackers exploit vulnerabilities in these systems, new versions are released with security patches... The problem is that when you customize a website, you usually version lock it.

This prevents you from performing any automatic upgrade. You must call the developer back to carry the customizations to the next version

Of course most people don't bother with this and often the developer has moved on or disappeared, leaving hackers with a huge number of websites to use. It's just so easy for them!