Public blogging platform WordPress hit by Distributed Denial of Service strike

A huge denial of service attack hit WordPress.com last week. The guess of the WordPress team is that the strike was motivated by political beliefs. Though WordPress.com was affected by the attack, the thousands of websites running a WordPress.org platform were not impacted.

WordPress.com gets Distributed Denial of Service attack to occur

Thursday, WordPress.com got hit by a denial of service attack. It was a huge one. WordPress.com, owned by the WordPress Foundation, is hosted by three large server farms. Part of the DDoS attack had gigabits of data sent. The WordPress servers received this data. The WordPress Distributed Denial of Service attack was larger than expected, although well-known web sites have DDoS attacks often. During the attack, websites hosted on WordPress.com were intermittently down.

The big web sites didn’t get impacted

The DDoS attack didn’t impact online websites such as CNN.com, Wired and Flickr even though they all run on WordPress. WordPress.org is the host for these online websites though. WordPress.com was attacked. The program from WordPress is used on sites such as Wired and CNN. They use WordPress as a content manager. However, using the WordPress program is not the very same as owning a WordPress.com site. WordPress Foundation hosts WordPress.com blogs. WordPress.org blogs and sites, on the other hand, are hosted on the company’s own servers. That means a DDoS attack on WordPress.com would not impact any website hosting their own installation of WordPress.

Paying for network security

It is really important to have network security in order to protect from DDoS and hacker attacks. Using WordPress.com as a larger service is where small businesses and individuals will outsource that security. Network security protection is offered by several of these hosting services. It is quite easy to send gigabits of information to a site. Keeping a site accessible for a larger business with its own website is more difficult to do because of this.

Citations

 

PC World

pcworld.com/article/221357/wordpress_recovers_from_huge_ddos_attack.html