A huge denial of service strike hit Wordpress.com last week. The belief of the WordPress team is the strike was motivated by arguments with a political blog hosted on the site. Though WordPress.com was impacted by the strike, the thousands of sites running a WordPress.org platform were not affected. Post Resource: Public blogging platform WordPress hit by DDoS attack.

Distributed Denial of Service attack hits WordPress.com

The distributed denial-of-service strike that hit WordPress.com last Thursday afternoon was very large. The WordPress Foundation owns WordPress.com. There are three large server farms that host it too. Part of the DDoS strike had gigabits of data sent. The WordPress servers received this data. It seems that the well-known websites get Distributed Denial of Service attacks often. It was surprising how big the WordPress Distributed Denial of Service attack was though. During the attack, online websites hosted on WordPress.com were intermittently down.

Large websites not hurt

The Distributed Denial of Service attack did not impact online websites such as CNN.com, Wired and Flickr even though they all run on WordPress. The reason for this is because they aren’t hosted by WordPress.com, they're hosted by WordPress.org. The program from WordPress is used on websites such as Wired and CNN. They use WordPress as a content manager. However, using the WordPress program isn't the exact same as owning a WordPress.com site. WordPress Foundation hosts WordPress.com blogs. There are WordPress.org blogs and websites though. The company’s servers are used for this. The DDoS attack doesn’t impact WordPress websites. This is because it was on WordPress.com.

 Spending money on network security

It is really essential to have network security to be able to protect from Distributed Denial of Service and hacker attacks. For smaller businesses and individuals, outsourcing that security by hosting sites on larger services such as WordPress.com makes sense. Some hosting services also offer network security protections. It is quite easy to send gigabits of information to a site. Keeping a site accessible for a larger company with its own website is more difficult to do because of this.

Articles cited:

PC World

pcworld.com/article/221357/wordpress_recovers_from_huge_ddos_attack.html