WordPress.com target of extensive DDoS attack

WordPress.com has been targeted by an extensive DDoS attack, and the millions of blogs it hosts have been temporarily unavailable or have been experiencing occasional disruptions because of it.

The news comes from Graham Cluley, one of Sophos’ security consultants, who got the confirmation directly from Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com).

“Sophos’s Naked Security site runs on the VIP version of the WordPress.com platform, and our writers have had some difficulties posting today because of this disruption,” he says and shares the information sent to him:

• The size of attack reached multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second
• Automattic workes with its upstream providers in order to establish defense measures
• The attack impacted all three of their datacenters in Chicago, San Antonio, and Dallas

“This is the largest and most sustained attack we’ve seen in our 6 year history. We suspect it may have been politically motivated against one of our non-English blogs but we’re still investigating and have no definitive evidence yet,” said Matt Mullenweg, WordPress.com and Automattic founder.