0 WordPress DDoS Attacks Allegedly Coming from China

A massive Distributed Denial-of-service attack struck popular blogging platform WordPress.com in last week. On March 3, WordPress issued an official statement acknowledging that it was targeted by "an extremely large DDoS attack" that is affecting its connectivity. A day after that, the site showed severe performance issues after the second attack that managed to hamper its operation indicated Automattic, the owner of WordPress.

Sara Rosso, a representative of Automattic, stated in an official statement, "The size of the attack is multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second. We are working to mitigate the attack, but because of the extreme size, it is proving rather difficult."

The WordPress systems are back to normal since the last two days. WordPress founder Matt Mullenwag told IDG News that the attacks originated in China. Touted to be one of the largest and most sustained attack originating for China, Mullenwag stated that the event had no political motive. 

Apart from being in news for strict censorship and moral policing, this isn't the first time China is being blamed of attacking major web services, stealing data from energy companies, hacking into Google's email service and much more by security solutions major McAfee. In defense of the Chinese government, a China foreign ministry spokesman said last month, "The allegation that China supports hacking is groundless."

WordPress did get the premium VIP websites up and running during the attack but many sites still faced difficulty in publishing content on the platform. This DDoS attack was an extremely large one that brought down three data centers in San Antonio, Chicago and Dallas. Four months ago, Tumblr.com got into war with 4Chan forum that led to DDoS attacks on each other. There has been no report about a third DDoS attack on wordpress.com as yet.