WordPress recovers from huge DDoS attack

WordPress recovers from huge DDoS attack

Politically motivated hackers are being blamed for a large Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) on the WordPress blog management system that has left many customers experiencing severe disruption.

In an official statement, the company described the attack as being of the order of “multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second,” severe enough to affect the company’s three data centers in Chicago, San Antonio, and Dallas.

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Slow-downs caused by the attack were noticed quickly by journalists and publishers, many of whom use the system to manage online content.

“WordPress.com is currently being targeted by a extremely large Distributed Denial of Service attack which is affecting connectivity in some cases,” read a WordPress statement in the hours after the attacks began.

“We are working to mitigate the attack, but because of the extreme size, it is proving rather difficult. At this time, everything should be back to normal as the attack has subsided, but we are actively working with our upstream providers on measures to prevent such attacks from affecting connectivity going forward,” it read.

An email sent to a third-party news site by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has since alluded to the motivation for such an organised and large-scale event.

“This is the largest and most sustained attack we’ve seen in our 6 year history. We suspect it may have been politically motivated against one of our non-English blogs but we’re still investigating and have no definitive evidence yet.”

This is not the first attack suffered by WordPress - such attacks are an hourly occurrence for any online business above a certain size - but the sheer size will be seen as worrying.

For comparison, a 2008 analysis by Arbor Networks of DDoS on the company noted that it had been hit by 268 DDoS events in a seven day period in February of that year, which reached 24,000 packets per second at their peak. That such attacks are now reaching into the Gigabits is a symptom of the greater resources that can now be accessed by attackers.

Full Story Here:
WordPress recovers from huge DDoS attack

Can you imagine the GOOD that these hackers could do if they applied their skills in a way that was productive rather than disruptive?

For 3 days last week the blogs that Rob at American and Proud and myself host were DOWN and for the most part, OUT. We got hacked too. It seems that in addition to WordPress being hit, our database was attacked as well. A backdoor Trojan was set and dealt our various blogs a dose of misery.

From Rob’s blog:

Well I must be doing something right, my site was hacked last night. Along with my friends who share a server with me. After some serious file snooping, back up checking and comparative analyzing we are back online.

I’ll give the douchebags a bit of credit, it was a good hit… But it takes more than some scumbag in mama’s basement to keep us good men down.

I was going through my potential suspect list and I came to the conclusion that it could have been any of these folks:

Liberpukes, Progressif*cks, Union slugs, Muslim goat lovers, Illegal Invaders, Democrats, Obama lovers, Wimps, Gangbangers, Thieves, Morons, Moonbats, Assholes, Politicians, RINO’s, Anti Gun nuts, PETA and probably a few others….

Either way, they suck at hacking because a redneck bog dwelling beer drinking gun shooting hick figured it out and put us back online… WOW that’s gotta hurt.

Posted Here:
American and Proud HACKED!

An outage from WordPress, coupled with the Trojan attack we suffered, tried the patience of Rob and myself greatly, you see, as this was all going down, WordPress was blaming our server host for holes in their security and our server host was blaming WordPress for holes in their security, thus allowing our sites to be attacked and shut down.

Fast forward to today and here comes the TRUTH of the matter, BOTH parties, WordPress and our server host were at least partly to blame. Also, another part of the problem was the fact that WordPress had done an update that was put out too soon, it wasn’t properly tested.

That was done in an effort to correct some serious security issues that the previous WordPress update left open and highly vulnerable, but in a rush to correct some previous issues, they only created more, and more serious issues.

In addition, one of the blogs we are hosting doesn’t put ANY effort into updating it’s security, it’s WordPress updates or plug-in updates. By not doing so, that particular blog opened us ALL up to some degree of vulnerability to attack.

That blog is shut down for now, and will remain so until Rob hears from the owner and some big security updates are put into place. We owe our readers that much, as safe a reading experience as we can provide because WE keep up on all of OUR security procedures.

I have to give some credit where credit is most due, that would be to Rob at American and Proud for his efforts to rectify our ills in this attack. Rob and I both maintain the databases and keep them updated and optimized, but Rob was the one that found the Trojan and removed it.

Rob is a code genius. And NOW his head will be SO big he won’t be able to get his cap on!