Yesterday was the day when not only the South Korea government met this problem, but also the publishers who have a WordPress account. The sites were down for several minutes, than they went down again and almost everyone who tried to post something yesterday, to use the plugins or to edit images and videos on their blogs experienced problems. This happened because a massive cyber attack was targeted against the WordPress blogs.
The problem is known for cybersecurity experts as “distributed denial of service”, which means that no matter how hard you would try, the system will not listen to you, but instead it will listen the person who now has the control over your data. ComputerWorld was one of the sites who announde this today, by saying also that this could be an attack which is possible to be connected to the Libyan attempt to make the opposition to shut up.
While some of the users were able to access their accounts, others who wanted to enter the site, were not able to post their articles and had problems with the uploading of the photos. http://blogs.computerworld.com/17918/wordpress_blog_service_down_huge_ddos_attack, this is the site where you can find more information about how the bloggers received this issue on Thursday, yesterday. According to TechCrunch, there are 30 million publishers who use WordPress as their blogging platform. Some of them use the free platform, while others use the paid platform. No matter the version, the blogs were hit yesterday by the biggest attack on a blogging platform in the history of WordPress.
This platform is not on the market for a long time and they have updated their security programs to be always ahead at least one step in front of the crackers. Apparently, this time, those were the ones who took the engineers one step ahead. This happened also with the South Korean government, which suffered from the same attack. On the TechCrunch site, there is a short post from the VIP blog that WordPress has, in which the blogging platform says that they will focus more on those accounts, who pay a lot of money to store their content there. You can imagine that a person who pays to have a site on WordPress, which probably runs a company and posts hundreds of posts everyday, and in addition, has a VIP account, was more than upset that this happened. This is why the WordPress’ release was that they will prioritize those accounts and will increase the security for every account stored on WordPress. They said that it is difficult to stop the attacks, because there are too many, but everything should be back to normal. http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/03/wordpress-com-suffers-major-ddos-attack/. This is the link where you can find the official release that appeared on the VIP blog yesterday.
