Lenovo released the ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 5 in mid 2020. This was a minor jump from the Gen 4 – they look very similar. The Intel CPU jumps up from 8th Gen to 10th Gen is nice – at the bottom end it’s about a 5% to 7% speed improvement, but there’s also faster RAM.

The laptop itself looks very sleek, feels robust, and the screen hinge is very firm – it’ll stay wherever you put it.

Let’s check out the specifications:

Tech Specs

Processor	10th Generation Intel® Core™ i5-10210U Processor (1.60 GHz, up to 4.20 GHz with Turbo Boost, 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 6 MB Cache) 10th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-10510U Processor (1.80 GHz, up to 4.90 GHz with Turbo Boost, 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 8 MB Cache) 10th Generation Intel® Core™ i5-10310U Processor with vPro™ (1.70 GHz, up to 4.40 GHz with Turbo Boost, 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 6 MB Cache) 10th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-10610U Processor with vPro™ (1.80 GHz, up to 4.90 GHz with Turbo Boost, 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 8 MB Cache)
Operating System	Ubuntu Linux Windows 10 Home Windows 10 Pro
Display	14″ 4K UHD (3840 x 2160) IPS, touchscreen with Dolby Vision™ HDR 400, AR/AS*, 500 nits14″ WQHD (2560 x 1440) IPS, touchscreen, AR/AS*, 300 nits 14″ FHD (1920 x 1080) IPS, touchscreen low power, AR/AS*, 400 nits 14″ FHD (1920 x 1080) IPS, touchscreen with Privacy Guard, AR/AS*, 500 nits*Antireflective / antismudge
Memory	Up to 16 GB LPDDR3 (Soldered)
Battery	Up to 19.3 hours* (MM14) Up to 13 hours* (MM18) 51Wh battery includes Rapid Charge
Storage	Up to 1 TB PCIe SSD
Graphics	Integrated Intel® UHD Graphics
Security	Fast Identity Online (FIDO) authentication capabilities Match-on-chip fingerprint reader TPM 2.0 chip ThinkShutter camera cover
Audio	Dolby Atmos® Speaker System 4 x 360-degree far-field microphones
Camera	HD 720p with ThinkShutter privacy cover Optional: Hybrid Infrared (IR) & HD 720p with ThinkShutter
Dimensions (W x D x H)	323mm x 218mm x 15.2mm / 12″ x 8.5″ x 0.59″
Weight	Starting at 1.35kg / 2.99lb
Color	Iron Gray
Connectivity	Intel® Wi-Fi 6 AX201 802.11AX (2 x 2) & Bluetooth® 5.1 Intel® Wi-Fi 6 AX201 802.11AX (2 x 2) & Bluetooth® 5.1 with vPro™Optional WWAN: Integrated Global Mobile Broadband 4G LTE-A
Ports	2 x USB-C Thunderbolt™ 3 (Power Delivery, DisplayPort)  2 x USB 3.2** (Gen 1) (1 Always on) HDMI 1.4 Network extension for Ethernet/side mechanical docking Headphone / mic combo
Keyboard	Full sized, spill resistant Backlit with white LED lighting
What’s in the box	ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 565W AC adapter ThinkPad Pen Pro4 Cell 51Wh Internal battery Quick start guide

I’ll point out some considerations on the above:

The CPU options are reasonable – i5 or i7 10th Gen Intel. Unless you need more CPU grunt, any of these options should be fine.

Ubuntu Linux officially supported and a pre-install option is good for those who prefer that space, and choice is always good. As much as I like Windows, you shouldn’t be forced to have it if you don’t want it.

There’s a lot of display options here, from 1080p (which I personally still go for in the work space), 2K, and 4K. A 1080p option is to have Privacy Guard – good for people who don’t want others seeing their screen – and it’s a toggle, rather than an always on thing:

The 16GB RAM has been my new minimum standard for the last few years – but also maximum, I see usage in the workplace easily go over 8GB with Edge/Chrome and Microsoft Teams running, but still not go near the 16GB mark.

The two battery options are again nice, with the smaller battery still more than enough for a day’s work. Rapid Charge is a must – you don’t want to have to plug in for hours if you do happen to run flat, before you can be on the go again.

Wi-Fi 6 is a nice upgrade on this model if you’re connecting to infrastructure that supports it. Here’s a good article on Wi-Fi 6 and it’s benefits.

OK, let’s move on to some photos of the device:

As per usual, I don’t have any complaints about the device. This review is a bit late, so I’ve been using it for quite a while without issue. As you can see from the above photos, it’s a bit of a fingerprint magnet, but nowhere as obvious in real life vs what shows up in a photo.

I’ve posted two other articles on Four Generations of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga and Fifth and Sixth Generations of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga if you’d like more details comparing this against other models. The newer Sixth Generation Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga is a bit more of a leap which I’ll review on it’s own soon.

I expect we’ll continue to see laptops in the X1 Yoga line-up for some time still!

*Although I am in a program with Lenovo (called Lenovo Insiders), no direct arrangements were made regarding this review or providing of hardware.

Yep, this site.

I’d been a bit quiet here for a few months due to some other commitments going on, but I was finally getting to a point where I could start blogging again. Upon trying to log in to WordPress Admin, my username/password wouldn’t work. After a few attempts I left it for the time being to come back later, figuring my browser had an incorrect password cached or I’d forgotten something about my credentials.

A few days later, I received an email alert from my hosting provider saying malware was detected on my website, from the ImunifyAV plugin running on plesk:

Yikes, I tried to log onto my website again unsuccessfully, but then tried the wordpress.com login option which worked – weird.

First thing I thought to do was to update my password, maybe my account had been compromised? I was still using the username ‘admin’ (yes I know), but I had a unique password in place, as well as a plugin installed called ‘Limit Attempts by BestWebSoft‘ which was configured to block an IP after 5 bad attempts for 1 1/2 hours. With a unique password and that in place, I thought it was still unlikely someone worked out the unique passsword here.

What I did notice in WordPress after going to the users section, was that there were 4 accounts, none that I recognised and none called admin. All the usernames had been changed to try and lock me out – which it had, but they’d not bothered dropping the wordpress.com login link.

I immediately created a new admin account (not called admin) and deleted the other accounts.

Next step was to work out what had been changed or infected. If I’d been running daily backups then it’d be easy (probably), roll back until the usernames weren’t changed. I had backups, but going back too far and I didn’t want to do the rework. All I really care about here is the content anyway, and I’m cheap so I wasn’t paying for a daily backup service, or the storage costs associated with that.

Since I don’t know PHP, the next step was on plesk to see what ImunityAV could do – it had an option to scan and repair these files, and at this stage I’d taken a new backup so had nothing to lose and let it do it’s thing. After a few passes it claimed it couldn’t find anything malicious and my site was all good. I checked over a few other things and couldn’t find anything wrong, so thought I was done. I also decided to de-activate a few plugins I didn’t think I needed any more, as that was a possible and common entry point to WordPress too.

A few days later someone told me they were seeing questionable content when clicking a link going to my site. Obviously my site wasn’t repaired, so I needed to sort it out or shut it down – the last thing I want is to be dealing up bad content. Just in case, I thought I’d go look at the user list again, and the usernames had been changed AGAIN. OK, it definitely wasn’t compromised credentials anymore – and sure maybe they’d put a backdoor in somewhere, but I pruned a few other WordPress addins and again cleaned up the accounts.

The owner of my hosting provider Expeed had suggested I try something like Wordfence as a WordPress plugin to help protect my site in the future. I found that this also had a scanning option, which I ran – and this found more malicious code within PHP files, as well as a bunch of HTML files around replica watches.

Several passes of scanning cleaned up all the PHP detections, but the html files weren’t getting removed.

I had a look at a few of the files out of interest, and if nothing else, it makes me feel better about the quality of the writing in my own posts here. The links were going back to different but non-reputable looking stores.

I’m guessing the idea of this attack was to purely drive purchasing traffic through to certain websites – if you wanted a replica watch, or a real life … doll, I was apparently helping you with that choice. Sorry.

Weirdly, they’d put all of the HTML files in the uploads folder for WordPress, so I manually went through and cleaned them out. That part didn’t take too long.

My site seems OK now, and wanted to be as comfortable as I could that it was now safe before posting up this explanation but how do you ever know if it’s fully safe? If anything else does come up I’ll either look at paying WordFence to clean it up professionally, or just rip the content out and start with a fresh WordPress instance, and import my posts. I’m pretty sure the culprit was one of the several abandoned plugins I had – about 12 or so were active, I didn’t need half anymore and a few of those hadn’t been updated for a couple of years. Just updating plugins isn’t enough, as all plugins were patched apart from one, but that was only two weeks outdated.

The real take-aways from this is have more frequent backups and an easy recovery process; there is no foolproof way of protecting anything online. Also, don’t feel too bad if your personal blog has been compromised – you’re the victim here. You can still do some things to protect yourself, here’s a reasonable article that lists 25 Simple WordPress Security Tricks to Keep Your Website Safe in 2021.

This really isn’t a good selling point overall for WordPress. You shouldn’t have to do this much work to protect what should be a platform to share content on.

If you want somewhere just to do simple text posts, check out GitHub Pages – but doing anything that’s not very basic will require a lot of time and effort if you’re not a developer. If you want to type and don’t mind giving your content and traffic to someone else, just use a platform like Medium. If you want a WordPress alternative that you can host yourself or with a hosting provider, then Ghost is worth a look.