Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks aren’t new and 2013 was one of the worst years when it comes to such attacks that too through the use of large botnets and / or specialised DDoS tools; however, use of legitimate WordPress blogs and sites to carry out such attacks is something that isn’t widespread, but is becoming a trend lately. According to Sucuri Research over 162,000 legitimate WordPress blogs and sites were a part of huge DDoS attacks on one of its client’s website. The attacker(s) used WordPress websites as indirect amplification vectors through a simple one line command. “Any WordPress site with XML-RPC enabled (which is on by default) can be used in DDOS attacks against other sites”, notes Sucuri CTO and OSSEC Founder Daniel Cid in a blog post. Cid explained that the DDoS attack was a large layer 7 HTTP-based distributed flood attack through which the perpetrators forced legit WordPress sites to send out thousands of requests per second to the victim’s servers. All the GET requests being sent to victim’s servers had a random value that bypassed their caching mechanism thereby forcing to load the whole page on every request, which killed the server quickly. “One attacker can use thousands of popular and clean WordPress sites to perform their DDOS attack, while being hidden in the shadows, and that all happens with a simple ping back request to the XML-RPC file” revealed Cid. Cid provides a couple of workarounds to ensure that your WordPress site isn’t DDoSing someone else’s site. First is to disable the XML-RPC (pingback) functionality from your site. This can be done by removing the xmlrpc.php or disabling the notifications in your blog’s settings. However, the thing is as soon as you upgrade your WordPress, the file come right back. Another solution is that users use some cloud based security solution or proxy site that will ensure that such misuse is prohibited. “This is a well known issue within WordPress and the core team is aware of it, it’s not something that will be patched though. In many cases this same issue is categorized as a feature, one that many plugins use, so in there lies the dilemma”, concludes Cid. Source: http://www.techienews.co.uk/977737/160000-legitimate-wordpress-sites-used-ddos/

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Over 160,000 legitimate WordPress sites used for DDoS attack