[Outages-discussion] [ PRIVACY Forum ] Huge attack on WordPress sites could spawn never-before-seen super botnet

[Greg Stewart]

The WordPress mailing lists have been rather active discussing it.

A couple of hardening tips if you're running WP, or run a host providing it:

http://ma.tt/2013/04/passwords-and-brute-force/
http://codex.wordpress.org/Brute_Force_Attacks



On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 11:02 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:

> FYI.  Am I the only person just hearing about this?
>
> ----- Forwarded Message -----
> > From: "PRIVACY Forum mailing list" <privacy at vortex.com>
>
> > Huge attack on WordPress sites could spawn never-before-seen super
> > botnet
> >
> > http://j.mp/ZRZksL (ars technica)
> >
> > "The unknown people behind the highly distributed attack are using
> > more
> > than 90,000 IP addresses to brute-force crack administrative
> > credentials of vulnerable WordPress systems, researchers from at least
> > three Web hosting services reported. At least one company warned that
> > the attackers may be in the process of building a "botnet" of infected
> > computers that's vastly stronger and more destructive than those
> > available today. That's because the servers have bandwidth connections
> > that that are typically tens, hundreds, or even thousands of times
> > faster than botnets made of infected machines in homes and small
> > businesses."
> >
> > - - -
> >
> > Up in the Net! It's a bug! It's a phish! It's SUPER-botnet!
> >
> > --Lauren--
> > Lauren Weinstein (lauren at vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
> > Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility:
> > http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info
> > Founder:
> > - Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
> > - PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
> > - Data Wisdom Explorers League: http://www.dwel.org
> > - Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance:
> > http://www.gctip.org
> > Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
> > Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
> > Google+: http://vortex.com/g+lauren / Twitter:
> > http://vortex.com/t-lauren
> > Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > privacy mailing list
> > http://lists.vortex.com/mailman/listinfo/privacy
>
> --
> Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink
> jra at baylink.com
> Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC
> 2100
> Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com         2000 Land
> Rover DII
> St Petersburg FL USA               #natog                      +1 727 647
> 1274
>
>
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