ID: IRCNE2014032127
Date: 2013-03-12
According to "cnet", with some old-fashioned trickery, hackers were able to get more than 162,000 legitimate WordPress-powered Web sites to mount a distributed-denial-of-service attack against another Web site, security researchers said Monday.
Security firm Sucuri said hackers leveraged a well-known flaw in WordPress. It's unclear which site was the victim of the cyberattack but Sucuri said it was a "popular WordPress site" that went down for many hours.
"It was a large HTTP-based (layer 7) distributed flood attack, sending hundreds of requests per second to their server," Sucuri chief technology officer Daniel Cid said in a blog post.
"Can you see how powerful it can be?" he wrote. "One attacker can use thousands of popular and clean WordPress sites to perform their DDOS attack, while being hidden in the shadows."
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