Blog publishing platform WordPress.com suffered a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack early this month, causing disruption to thousands of users. The attacks were severe enough to interfere with the company’s three data centers in Chicago, San Antonio and Dallas. Normal service resumed on the site on 4 March. It is believed the attacks originated in China.
A DDoS attack involves harnessing hundreds or thousands of malware-controlled computers to simultaneously bombard a website with data so it becomes overwhelmed.
The attacks directed “multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second” and were the “largest and most sustained” in its six-year history, according to WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg.
China has been frequently named as the country of origin for several major cyberattacks, in part owing to the strict control of services like search engines and social networks. Chinese hackers have been accused of launching cyber attacks to steal gigabytes of data from foreign energy companies, according to security vendor McAfee. In 2009, Google was also the victim of an attack that it alleged originated from China.
Very often the true source of a DDoS attack is unclear. While computers launching the attacks might be based in one country, they could be under control of hackers in a third country. Users at high risk of malware infections that can be used for DDoS attacks are those that don’t run anti-virus software, don’t keep their operating system updated or are running pirated operating systems that can’t be updated.
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