CNS1 Oct 2013 17:21
“For months, some security researchers have been warning of an epidemic of infections at sites hosting popular platforms like WordPress and Joomla. Last Friday, more evidence of that trend appeared as a botnet composed of more than 500 compromised WordPress blogs launched DDoS blizzard attacks on sites across the Web.
Among the sites reportedly in the botnet were blogs at Mercury Science and Policy at MIT, National Endowment for the Arts, Pennsylvania State University and Stevens Institute of Technology.
"Wordpress servers have become just another easy target for nation-state supported hackers, electronic armies and technical extremists that happen to wake up on the wrong side of the bed on any given day," Stephen Gates, chief security evangelist for Corero Network Security, told TechNewsWorld.
Hackers want to create botnets that are more powerful, have more reach, and can do more damage than in the past, he explained. WordPress or any other hosting platform gives them those capabilities.
For Gates, it's a matter of simple math. To build a botnet that could generate 100 Gbps of attack traffic using older computers sitting behind DSL modems generating a modest 1 Mbps of attack traffic, you'd need 100,000 machines.
"That's a rather sizable botnet that any hacker would be proud of," he said.
However, if you infect a server sitting in a hosting environment, it could generate 1 Gbps of attack traffic, and you could generate 100 Gpbs of attack traffic with just 100 machines.
"That's a very small botnet with some serious horsepower," Gates observed.
http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/79073.html