WordPress Under Attack

Huge attack on WordPress sites could spawn never before seen super botnet   Ars Technica

There’s a headline tonight on ArsTechnica, the technology blog:

Huge attack on WordPress sites could spawn never-before-seen super botnet

This site runs on WordPress. So do all the other sites I build. Obviously, a scary headline.

Scary for ArsTechnica too. Their site is also built on WordPress.

This is pretty wicked stuff. It’s called a brute force attack because password after password is sent to the default “admin” account. The attackers are looking for sites protected with commonly used passwords.

Most of my sites don’t use “admin.” I’ll try and harden the rest this weekend. it’s a pretty simple change.

None of my sites use dictionary words for their password. This attack won’t work on me.

ArsTechnica speculates the huge bandwidth available through websites running WordPress could make these compromised machines the most powerful botnet ever seen!

This is like science fiction. Except it’s real.

One thought on “WordPress Under Attack”

  1. Sh*t, that explains a lot. All 5 of our WordPress sites have been up and down over the past 2 days because of that. We’ve been on the phone multiple times with LiquidWeb, our host. Thanks for the heads up!

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