Sucuri Reveals a Denial of Service Attack for WordPress

This is a repost from an announcement by Sucuri, The web security company.

Protect your site from DDoS attacks

If you’ve been following our blog, you know that we recently uncovered multiple DoS / DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, in which attackers are abusing the built-in pingback feature found in WordPress to carry out DDOS attacks on sites. If you’re running your website on WordPress, then it’s possible for your site to be used in a Denial of Service attack (Learn about DOS and DDOS attacks here).

We flagged this problem when we analyzed data from a recent attack on a client that has our CloudProxy Website Firewall activated. Specifically, the attackers are using the pingback feature inherent in WordPress to perform Layer 7 Flood Attacks. This attack extends beyond the WordPress platform, and can be used to attack sites on any platform–e.g. Joomla, Drupal, osCommerce, vBulletin. If you are experiencing a disruption in service with your website, get in contact with your hosts, or if you prefer to shield yourself from attacks like this in advance, look into activating a website firewall, like CloudProxy*, that can virtually patch and harden issues like this.

If you’re monitoring your website or have ever had to clean your website of malware using our service, you know how awful it feels when your site goes down or is blacklisted through no fault of your own, and you know that the internet is only secure when all of us in the community make it secure.

Together, we can all make the web a safer place.

-The team at Sucuri

I have seen what can happen when a site is infected. The visitors get infected. The site reputation gets ruined and nobody is happy. You can prevent that, check that and know your business online is not infecting its customers.

Get Sucuri protection today.