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WordPress Recovering from DDoS Attack

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Web Hosting Geek

Industry-leading open-source blogging platform WordPress was hit by a major Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Thursday, March 3rd, 2011. The report released by “The Register” states that the attack caused major disruptions and performance issues for sites that totally rely on the platform for creating and publishing content.

The Largest DDoS in Company History

Another web hosting source, TechCrunch, released further information stating that WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg claimed this DDoS attack was by far the largest he had seen. He believes this strike was politically motivated against one or many of the non-English speaking blogs. However, there is no evidence to the reason. This assault was so large; it affected all three of the company’s data centers in Dallas, San Antonio and Chicago.

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The Size was Incredible

According to Sara Rosso, a representative for WordPress, the company is being targeted by large-scaled DDoS attacks affecting the connectivity to many blogs and websites. The sheer size of the harassment was multiple Gigabytes per second and tens of millions of packets per second. This is definitely in the record books of being one of the largest DDoS attacks ever on a content management system.

Quick Turnaround Time

According to Lloyd Budd, the WordPress.com VIP hosting services lead, Rosso released this statement to the public at 3:30 PM on Thursday with the site being 100 percent functional with no connectivity issues by 7:30 PM the same day. That is an extremely quick turnaround following such a major assault.

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VIP Sites to have Priority

The upstream service providers have been working on preventing these types of attacks in the future. The company also announced they will be giving their VIP sites priority following the recovery from an attack such as this.

10 Percent of the World’s Websites

The WordPress platform currently services over 30 million publishers making them responsible for almost 10 percent of all websites in the world! WordPress.com boasts over 300 million unique visits each month. Therefore, when a disaster such as the aforementioned occurs, the results can be devastating.

DDoS attacks can have a major impact on the site or network they are attacking. Since this type of assault freezes or shuts down the server due to overload, it is difficult to defend against and impossible to predict. The best defense is being able to switch web accounts to a different server as soon as this occurs thus minimizing downtime and continuing to uphold performance.

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