WordPress and LiveJournal Hit by DDoS Attack
During the last couple of days, both the WordPress and the LiveJournal blogging platforms have been hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
Yesterday morning WordPress.com, the for-profit branch of the company, was hit by a denial of service attack directed at one of its three data centers. As a result, some of the blogs hosted by the Automattic-owned company were either taken down for a short while or resulted slower to access, but no permanent damage was done, also thanks to the redundancy of its data centers that made it possible for most sites to keep running smoothly without consequences.
“I think maybe a few blogs were down for just a little while this morning, but most of them were just running a bit slower,” a spokesperson for Automattic told AppScout this morning. “We have three data centers. Our system is designed to lose a data center and keep running.”
The site has experienced similar attacks before, out of which the most severe was the one occurring in mid February, when another DDoS attack prevented all its users from logging for almost an entire day, according to an anonymous source interviewed by ComputerWorld at the time.
A denial of service attack (Dos) is, in simple terms, an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users, which is usually obtained by flooding the target servers with a huge amount of traffic, and results in the site loading to be very slow for actual visitors, to the point where the site becomes impossible to navigate. In a distrubited Dos (DDos), the traffic simply comes from a number of different locations controlled by the attacker.
Motives for DoS attacks may vary, but perpetrators mostly target companies with high-profile, highly trafficked Web sites. On some occasions, the attackers are providers of security services that choose to target the websites of potential clients in order to demonstrate the need for their services; some other times, the attacks can come directly from the most prominent business rivals.
Whatever the cause, a similar attack has been perpetrated on the popular blogging platform LiveJournal: over the past couple of days, the site has suffered another denial of service attack that slowed down (and momentarily put offline) the site in two different occasions, as confirmed by a LiveJournal spokesman. The company is at the moment unable to state whether the perpetrators are the same who have attacked the WordPress website, even though the circumstances make this the most likely option.
Tags: DDoS Attack, WordPress.com
Dario Borghino
Dario Borghino is a computer engineering student at Turin's
Polytechnic, Italy. He started writing science and technology related
articles in February 2008 and his articles have appeared on sites such
as ISEdb.COM, eHow and Suite101.com. You can visit his personal Web site here.
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