20,000 Strong WordPress Botnet Attacks Other WordPress Sites

WordPress security company Defiant recently reported the existence of a botnet composed of 20,000 infected WordPress installations which is being used by cybercriminals to attack other WordPress sites.

 

Defiant says the crooks launched “dictionary attacks.” which are repeated login attempts that that use a series of username and password combinations in hopes of scoring a hit and gain access to an account. Around 5 million attempts had been launched in the last month alone, added researcher Mikey Veenstra.

 

While Defiant says it already shared the information with law enforcement, the botnet’s four command-and-control servers could not be taken down as they are hosted on HostSailor, a company with a reputation for bulletproof hosting that does not honor takedown requests.

 

Source: ZDNet