The Botnet Threat Bites Again!

Since our last Botnet post in January alot has happened. For our new readers, here is a quick introduction as to what the Beast of Botnet is capable of.

So in the next sentence we will describe what this strange word "Botnet" is. Bot (Robot) + Net (Network) = Botnet, a network of computers. I know, many complicated terms there. Blame Karel Čapek. It is what these computers do which is the horrifically scary part.


In latest news we've seen Wordpress has come under a substantial campaign of attacks from a Botnet. The attacking network utilised more than 90,000 computers to perform Denial of Service attacks or DoS attacks. Another funny word, but thats just when a website shuts down because it can't handle a huge spike in traffic, like a prolific festival website that isn't using our Participant platform for example...zing!

Below is a diagram displaying just how the seasoned Bot Herder uses infected bots to make a resource or site unavailable as hell yo!

But who cares about Wordpress? Well, it turns out this Botnet does, the perfect Botnet attackers are looking to build a more powerful system than the previous (aren't we all?) so after each attack it stands to reason the threat increases it's resources and capabilities, after all, nothing robust got that way from being wrapped in cotton wool. According to W3Techs cotton wool and jargon accounts for 95% of all Wordpress sites, thats a joke, W3 never said that, nor would they want to, they do say however that Wordpress accounts for an estimated 17.7% of all internet sites, which is frankly obscene.

It is reported that in the attack on Wordpress which occurred in mid April 2013, saw Cloudflare (security to Wordpress) fend off around 60million requests in one hour. A staggering amount of work implemented by 90,000 computers, but it gets better. The attack comes a week after Wordpress released a two step log in process. What has also got Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare worried is that these attacks came from basic desktop computers and there is a distinctive chance that this attack was indeed preparation for a larger DDoS attack (new D = distributed).

For more reading about Botnet and to see where we stole the Bot Herder diagram from click here!

Follow us on Twitter to discuss this in more detail, @ParticipantUK, until next time!