WordPress Deactivated With Unexplained DDoS Assault

A massive Distributed Denial-of-Service assault struck the well-known blogging site WordPress.com causing disruption in its linkages with several blogs it hitherto hosted. EWeek reported this on March 4, 2011. It was 3rd March 2011, when the assault started immediately prior to 11AM Eastern Time and then continued over the next 2-hrs.

Stated Graham Cluley Senior Technology Consultant at Sophos, DDoS assaults commonly occurred from botnets, armies of hijacked PCs, overwhelming an Internet site with so many visitors that a saturation point reached on it making it impossible for genuine visitors to access the site.V3.co.uk reported this on March 3, 2011.

Incidentally, there are 18m websites that WordPress hosts while doing a mean of 600m pageviews every week. Stated founding developer Matt Mullenweg of WordPress, work was on for lessening the assault; however, since the size was massive, specialists were finding it rather hard. He explained that the assault's size was many GBs/sec along with several million packets every sec. CNNMoney.com reported this on March 3, 2011.

Apparently, the attacks were politically motivated, while targeting a blog in some other country's language that WordPress.com was hosting; however, there wasn't any definite proof so far.

WordPress, in its VIP blog post, informed that it was currently coordinating with the concerned team to devise measures for stopping the said assaults from disrupting linkages.

Significantly, DDoS assaults aren't very sophisticated; however, they prove very difficult when websites try to block them. The attacker drives such an enormous number of visitors onto its target that it becomes difficult for the site's web-servers to contain the traffic thereby preventing genuine visitors from accessing the Internet site.

The downtime remained for some 6-hrs; however, WordPress.com is now up and running again. And although a few sporadic problems associated with the site's performance are visible, they aren't too much for interrupting services.

Stated Mullenweg, the problem had presently being counteracted, however, there was a probability of it bombarding again so proactive measures were being enforced. Seemingly, the attack had political motives as it targeted a non-English blog of the company, prompting ongoing investigations, Mullenweg added. PCMag.com reported this on March 3, 2011.

Related article: WordPress Discovers Crucial Vulnerability; Recommends End-Users to Load Update

» SPAMfighter News - 3/14/2011