WordPress.com is a popular blogging host. Recently, for unknown reasons miscreants launched a massive distributed denial of service attack (DDOS) against WordPress.com. According to TechCrunch (http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/03/wordpress-com-suffers-major-ddos-attack/) WordPress.com is responsible for 10% of the websites in the world.
So far I have not seen anyone take responsibility for the attacks. With so many websites being hosted it is impossible to say who the intended target of the attack was, however there was a lot of collateral damage.
This is an interesting lesson about “The Cloud”. When your data is hosted by a provider who hosts for hundreds or thousands of clients, all it takes is for one client to anger some miscreant and your site becomes collateral damage as well. On the flip side, if you are the target of the DDOS then these large hosting sites generally will have more resources to combat the attack.
Food for thought!
Randy Abrams
Director of Technical Education
Cyber Threat Analysis Center
ESET North America
