At wordpress.org’s devblog, this entry by Wordpress’s primary developer, Matt Mullenweg:

This isn’t meant to criticize the fine people behind blogrolling.com at all. Realistically, anyone can be hacked and most people have been at some point. However the principle of the matter is that this shouldn’t have been a problem in the first place; it shouldn’t have rocked the weblog world like it did. How to change? Host your blogroll yourself. This is why WordPress’ links feature offers weblogs.com XML support, an unlimited number of blogrolls and links, OPML import (so you don’t have to re-enter all your links), and a handy bookmarklet — all for free. Even if you don’t use WordPress, please at least consider moving to a decentralized method of managing your blogroll.

The comment by Chris Burkhardt led me to thinking that one way to actually promote Wordpress would be to release the link manager as a stand-alone product that can lead to people signing up for Wordpress itself. I do understand, that the dynamic model (eloquent speak for PHP, haha) behind WP may be unappealing for some (like Kathy Kinsley, who does advocate having static files) so it may scare some people away from the product.

Despite this, I understand, and so should you, the need for decentralization of information stored on the web. It was, besides, one of the key inspirations for the Internet itself. A fortress is vulnerable in that it makes itself a visible target. The people within are helpless to leave once they have locked the enemy out; with a siege, only time and effort are necessary to defeat the people within. It will become its own prison. The walls fell today at blogrolling.com. Perhaps a rare occasion, in fact, as rare as a website hacking on just about any service of the same magnitude. The effects for three hours, on the other hand, were disastrous, because everyone basically got hacked. Laura had her own share of vitriol from just about everyone. Jason D, three thousand emails which I think would remain unread before deletion (Come on: at ten seconds each it’d be 8.3 hours before Jason weeded through them).

This can be minimized, as Matt says, by maintaining your own blogroll. Hopefully the WP Link Manager can be developed into a stand-alone, free product. The expense involved would involve only the disk and database space, and the bandwidth required to host it yourself, and as many of us know, being hosted with your own domain provides for better service and connectivity across the blogosphere.

The situation comes with its own problems, but it would be better than having to have the majority of the sphere’s blogrolls point to a single blog, a collateral victim in the attack.