Global WordPress Brute Force Attack Underway

Global WordPress Brute Force Attack Underway

We received this email this morning, and the attack has started on some of our hosted sites in Australia.  Our precautions are holding up and we are monitoring the situation.  If you have any disruption to your site, please let us know by email with a screen shot as soon as you can.

If you have a wordpress site that is not hosted with us, and it is attacked, locked, defaced or destroyed, let us know to see if we can assist….

 

Hold onto you hats!

Regards

 

Mark Tull

Website Essentials

As of 11am eastern time this morning we are monitoring the largest distributed brute force attack on WordPress installations that we’ve seen to date. The real-time attack map on www.wordfence.com became so busy that we’ve had to throttle the amount of traffic we show down to 4% of actual traffic.

A brute force attack is when an attacker tries many times to guess your username password combination by repeatedly sending login attempts. A distributed brute force attack is when an attacker uses a large number of machines spread around the internet to do this in order to circumvent any blocking mechanisms you have in place.

If you’re using the free or paid version of Wordfence you should have the option to “Participate in the real-time Wordfence security network” under ‘Other options’ enabled. This will immediately block any attack originating from an IP address that has attacked other WordPress sites using Wordfence. This is an effective defense against this kind of attack.

We recommend that until this passes you monitor your WordPress websites closely for unusual activity including logins, account creation or changes to the public facing website.

 

Mark Maunder

Wordfence Creator & Feedjit Inc. CEO.