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Warning: WordPress.com Under Massive DDOS Attack, Temporarily Stopped

Warning: WordPress.com Under Massive DDOS Attack, Temporarily Stopped

WordPress.com, the host of many popular WordPress powered Blogs including TechCrunch, has been hit with a massive DDOS attack taking down the service. Blog owners are reporting slowness when logging in or loading their WordPress powered sites.

Graham Cluley, Senior technology consultant for Sophos Tweeted an email sent to VIP customers such as TechCrunch:

WordPress is currently being targeted by a extremely large Distributed Denial of Service attack which is affecting connectivity in some cases. The size of the attack is multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second.

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.

We will be making our VIP sites a priority in this endeavor, and as always, you can contact us [REDACTED] for the latest update. We will also update this post with more information as it becomes available.

TechCrunch, one of the largest sites to use WordPress has been unable to publish and site availability is sporadic:

WordPress did not mention the origin of the attack (DDoS =! Anonymous) and I have contacted founder Matt Mullenweg for more information. WordPress.com currently serves 30 million publishers, including VIPs TED, CBS and TechCrunch, and is responsible for 10% of all websites in the world. WordPress.com itself sees about 300 million unique visits monthly

According to WordPress.com’s Tweets service was restored 7 hours from the post’s publish date of 11AM PST. However, sporadic slowness is still appearing.

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As of now, the attacker has not been identified but is believed to be a politically motivated assault. The recent unrest in the Middle East has led to a greater use of Blogging to inform the world and fellow protesters of the various revolutions taking place. Pro-Government supporters could have targeted non-english Blogs in their DDOS attack in an effort to silence them.

The Blog Herald will keep you updated.

Update

According to WordPress their services are back to normal.

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