{"id":288570,"date":"2011-03-03T22:08:07","date_gmt":"2011-03-03T22:08:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ghanamma.net\/2011\/03\/03\/wordpress-hammered-by-massive-attack\/"},"modified":"2011-03-03T22:08:07","modified_gmt":"2011-03-03T22:08:07","slug":"wordpress-hammered-by-massive-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/03\/03\/wordpress-hammered-by-massive-attack\/","title":{"rendered":"WordPress hammered by massive attack"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><div readability=\"70.2684766214\"><span id=\"fb-recommend\"\/><br \/>\n<span>By Laurie Segall, staff reporter<\/span><span>March 3, 2011: 4:58 PM ET<\/span><!--startclickprintexclude--><br clear=\"all\"\/><!--endclickprintexclude--><!-- CONTENT --><\/p>\n<p>NEW YORK (CNNMoney) &#8212; One of the Web&#8217;s largest blog hosting sites, WordPress, struggled to keep functioning Thursday through a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.<\/p>\n<p>Matt Mullenweg, WordPress&#8217; founding developer, called the assault &#8220;the largest and most sustained attack we&#8217;ve seen in our six year history.&#8221; Its effects hit all three data centers run by Automattic, the San Francisco developer that owns WordPress. <\/p>\n<p><!-- REAP --><!--startclickprintexclude--><!--endclickprintexclude--><!-- \/REAP --><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s currently been neutralized, but it&#8217;s possible it could flare up again later,&#8221; Mullenweg said Thursday afternoon. &#8220;We suspect it may have been politically motivated against one of our non-English blogs, but we&#8217;re still investigating and have no definitive evidence yet.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>WordPress hosts 18 million sites and does a weekly average of around 600 million pageviews. Its blogging platform powers parts of CNNMoney. <\/p>\n<p>The company notified its paying subscribers of the attack Thursday morning.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We are working to mitigate the attack, but because of the extreme size, it is proving rather difficult,&#8221; it wrote in an e-mail alert. &#8220;The size of the attack is multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>But by the afternoon, the effects had subsided, and WordPress&#8217; <a href=\"http:\/\/status.automattic.com\/\" target=\"new\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">status site<\/a> reported that operations were running normally. <\/p>\n<p>DDoS attacks are unsophisticated but extremely hard for websites to defend against. The attacker directs a giant traffic surge to its target, overwhelming the site&#8217;s servers and making it hard for legitimate users to access the site. <\/p>\n<p>Mastercard.com and Visa.com struggled last year under similar attacks. In contrast, some of the Web&#8217;s largest sites &#8212; like Google and Amazon.com &#8212; are frequent targets but <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2010\/12\/09\/technology\/amazon_wikileaks_attack\/index.htm\">have the resources to scale up<\/a> as needed to fend off most denial-of-service attempts. \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2011\/03\/03\/technology\/wordpress_attack\/index.htm?section=money_topstories&#038;utm_source=feedburner&#038;utm_medium=feed&#038;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fmoney_topstories+%28Top+Stories%29#TOP\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i.cdn.turner.com\/money\/images\/bug.gif\" alt=\"To top of page\" border=\"0\" width=\"7\" height=\"7\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><!-- \/CONTENT --><!--startclickprintexclude--><!--startclickprintexclude--><br \/>\n<!--endclickprintexclude--><!--endclickprintexclude--><\/div>\n<\/p>\n<p>Visit link:<br \/>\n<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/rss.cnn.com\/~r\/rss\/money_topstories\/~3\/upbl0ZeBlHc\/index.htm\" title=\"Wordpress hammered by massive attack\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">WordPress hammered by massive attack<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p> By Laurie Segall, staff reporter March 3, 2011: 4:58 PM ET NEW YORK (CNNMoney) &#8212; One of the Web&#8217;s largest blog hosting sites, Wordpress, struggled to keep functioning Thursday through a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Matt Mullenweg, Wordpress&#8217; founding developer, called the assault &#8220;the largest and most sustained attack we&#8217;ve seen in our six year history.&#8221; Its effects hit all three data centers run by Automattic, the San Francisco developer that owns Wordpress. &#8220;It&#8217;s currently been neutralized, but it&#8217;s possible it could flare up again later,&#8221; Mullenweg said Thursday afternoon. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-288570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Wordpress hammered by massive attack - Ghanamma.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/03\/03\/wordpress-hammered-by-massive-attack\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"Wordpress hammered by massive attack - Ghanamma.com\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"By Laurie Segall, staff reporter March 3, 2011: 4:58 PM ET NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- One of the Web&#039;s largest blog hosting sites, Wordpress, struggled to keep functioning Thursday through a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Matt Mullenweg, Wordpress&#039; founding developer, called the assault &quot;the largest and most sustained attack we&#039;ve seen in our six year history.&quot; Its effects hit all three data centers run by Automattic, the San Francisco developer that owns Wordpress. &quot;It&#039;s currently been neutralized, but it&#039;s possible it could flare up again later,&quot; Mullenweg said Thursday afternoon.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:image\" content=\"http:\/\/i.cdn.turner.com\/money\/images\/bug.gif\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@ghanamma\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@ghanamma\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"1 minute\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/03\/03\/wordpress-hammered-by-massive-attack\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/03\/03\/wordpress-hammered-by-massive-attack\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"\",\"@id\":\"\"},\"headline\":\"WordPress hammered by massive attack\",\"datePublished\":\"2011-03-03T22:08:07+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/03\/03\/wordpress-hammered-by-massive-attack\/\"},\"wordCount\":305,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/03\/03\/wordpress-hammered-by-massive-attack\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"http:\/\/i.cdn.turner.com\/money\/images\/bug.gif\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/03\/03\/wordpress-hammered-by-massive-attack\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/03\/03\/wordpress-hammered-by-massive-attack\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/03\/03\/wordpress-hammered-by-massive-attack\/\",\"name\":\"Wordpress hammered by massive attack - Ghanamma.com\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/03\/03\/wordpress-hammered-by-massive-attack\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/03\/03\/wordpress-hammered-by-massive-attack\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"http:\/\/i.cdn.turner.com\/money\/images\/bug.gif\",\"datePublished\":\"2011-03-03T22:08:07+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/03\/03\/wordpress-hammered-by-massive-attack\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/03\/03\/wordpress-hammered-by-massive-attack\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/i.cdn.turner.com\/money\/images\/bug.gif\",\"contentUrl\":\"http:\/\/i.cdn.turner.com\/money\/images\/bug.gif\"},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/\",\"name\":\"Ghanamma.com\",\"description\":\"News In Ghana - Latest Ghana News Headlines\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Wordpress hammered by massive attack - Ghanamma.com","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/03\/03\/wordpress-hammered-by-massive-attack\/","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_title":"Wordpress hammered by massive attack - Ghanamma.com","twitter_description":"By Laurie Segall, staff reporter March 3, 2011: 4:58 PM ET NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- One of the Web's largest blog hosting sites, Wordpress, struggled to keep functioning Thursday through a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. 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