A large number of WordPress websites are infiltrated and become the source of DDOS attacks

A large number of WordPress websites are infiltrated and become the source of DDOS attacks

Recently, Sucuri security researchers found that tens of thousands of WordPress sites were used for layer-3 DDos attacks. A total of 26,000 different WordPress sites continuously send HTTPS requests to the same website at 10 thousand to eleven thousand times per second, up to 20 thousand times per second. More seriously, if the Pingback function is enabled by default, any WordPress site in the world may be used to become a source of DDos attack networks.

HTTP Flood is a large-scale traffic attack initiated against Web Services in the layer-7 protocol. It can not only directly cause slow Web Front-end response, it also indirectly attacks business-layer logic such as backend Java and more backend database services, increasing their pressure and even affecting log storage servers.

We recommend that you disable Pingback for all Wordpress-based websites as soon as possible. Although the website cannot be protected from attacks, hackers will be terminated to use your website to attack other targets.

The best practice is to close it together with xmlrpc if you are sure you do not need pingbacks. If necessary, you can simply modify the. htaccess file and only allow IP addresses in the whitelist to access the file. The popular plug-in Jetpack can also be used for traffic monitoring.

WordPress's pingback service can be exploited by DDoS attacks. This vulnerability was disclosed early. However, many websites still have this problem because website owners seldom deliberately prevent websites from being captured by botnets. Because the DDoS attack traffic comes from thousands of different IP addresses, the network-based firewall cannot identify and intercept the traffic, and the Access frequency of each IP Address can only be limited.

 

Researchers also found that most of the source websites hosting the attack are hosted by well-known VPS/cloud service providers: Amazon's AWS, Digital Ocean, Google cloud, Microsoft's Azure, HETZNER, OVH, and Linode.

Original article address: Thousands of WordPress websites used as a platform to launch DDOS

Chinese Source: freebuf

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