WordPres Blogs DoS Attack

Blogs were inaccessible for about 5 to 15 minutes in the 4 days that have passed since Saturday, when the attack started. Automattic, the company that maintains WordPress.com, was knee deep in the work laid before them by hackers all throughout this period and managed to restore most of the service's original functions by yesterday afternoon.

Logging into accounts and posting was only the tip of the DoS (denial of service) attack, spokesman Matt Mullenweg told PC World in an email that his company noted spikes of 6 gigabits (768 Mb) of income traffic. "Obviously that [is not good] and is pretty unusual for our service. [�] All our people who can are working on the issue," he wrote. Automatic let the bloggers know about the problem via email.

The WordPress.com homepage was down for a longer period of time than the regular blogs because, Mullenweg said, "we sacrificed it in order to keep blogs and our users up." That's a nice gesture, but it was the only one to be made under the given circumstances, due to the old time policy of "the customer is more important."

Various suppositions about the cause for the DoS attack were made and Joris Evers, spokesman for security research and software company McAfee, said that a distinct possibility was that it was caused by someone "who was upset about something that was written on a WordPress blog, and they decided to take action against that."

According to Wikipedia, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted, malevolent efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely.