14 DAY TRIAL // WordPress.com was the target of several major distributed denial-of-service attacks last week that were launched from computers in China.
WordPress.com is a blog hosting service based on the WordPress platform and run by Automattic, the company that maintains and sponsors the software.
The service hosts around 18 million websites (blogs) on either WordPress.com subdomains or their own domains names in the case of premium customers like TechCrunch, CBS or TED.
The first and most crippling attack hit last Thursday and was described by Matt Mullenweg, WordPress founder and Automattic CEO as the largest and most sustained attack the service has seen in its six-year history.
According to data released by the company, it was multiple Gigabit per second and affected all of their three datacenters in Chicago, San Antonio and Dallas.
A day after service was restored another attack hit causing new stability issues, but it helped the company determine that the target was a Chinese-language website hosted on their platform.
"This time we were able to recover more quickly, and also determined one of the targets to be a Chinese-language site which appears to be also blocked on Baidu.
"The vast majority of the attacks were coming from China (98%) with a little bit of Japan and Korea mixed in," Mr. Mullenweg told TechCrunch.
The source of the attack was most likely a botnet and in particular one of the several botnet-based pay-per-DDoS services in the country.
Back in September, security researchers warned about one such service called "I'M DDOS" which at its peak was adding 10,000 new computers to the underlying botnet every day.
Also, it doesn't appear as if the attacks were political motivated, but more likely the result of a business rivalry given the nature of the undisclosed target website.
Using DDoS against competitors is common in Asia and sometimes can have serious consequences. In May 2009 an attack launched by an online game developer against its rivals caused an unexpected cascade effect that knocked out Internet in five Chinese provinces.