A short while ago, WordPress.com suffered a major DDoS attack. According to TechCrunch, this made it almost impossible for them to cover the story as they could barely get the post up. According to the Automattic status site:
WordPress.com is currently being targeted by an 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, the attack seems to have stopped, but WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg says they are taking every precaution against a recurrence of the attack. He also says the attack might be politically motivated.
“There’s an ongoing DDoS attack that was large enough to impact all three of our datacenters in Chicago, San Antonio, and Dallas — it’s currently been neutralized but it’s possible it could flare up again later, which we’re taking proactive steps to implement.
This is the largest and most sustained attack we’ve seen in our 6 year history. We suspect it may have been politically motivated against one of our non-English blogs but we’re still investigating and have no definitive evidence yet.”
Of course, Anonymous, the group who has used similar attacks on numerous targets recently is the first to come to mind. At this time, there is no evidence they have anything to do with it.
via TechCrunch