Wordpress users are advised to change their user names Wordpress has been attacked by a botnet of "tens of thousands" of individual computers since last week, according to server hosters Cloudflare and Hostgator.
The botnet targets Wordpress users with the username "admin", trying thousands of possible passwords.The attack began a week after Wordpress beefed up its security with an optional two-step authentication log-in option.
The site currently powers 64m websites read by 371m people each month.
According to survey website W3Techs, around 17% of the world's websites are powered by Wordpress.
"Here's what I would recommend: If you still use 'admin' as a username on your blog, change it, use a strong password," wrote Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg on his blog.
He also advised adopting two-step authentication, which involves a personalised "secret number" allocated to users in addition to a username and password, and ensuring that the latest version of Wordpress is installed.
"Most other advice isn't great - supposedly this botnet has more than 90,000 IP addresses, so an IP-limiting or login-throttling plugin isn't going to be great (they could try from a different IP [address] a second for 24 hours)," Mr Mullenweg added.Matthew Prince, Chief Executive and co-founder of Cloudflare, said that the aim of the attack may have been to build a stronger botnet.
"One of the concerns of an attack like this is that the attacker is using a relatively weak botnet of home PCs in order to build a much larger botnet of beefy servers in preparation for a future attack," he wrote in a blog post.
"These larger machines can cause much more damage in DDoS [Distributed Denial of Service] attacks because the servers have large network connections and are capable of generating significant amounts of traffic," he added.
Hi-tech crime terms
- Bot - one of the individual computers in a botnet; bots are also called drones or zombies
- Botnet - a network of hijacked home computers, typically controlled by a criminal gang
- Malware - an abbreviation for malicious software ie a virus, trojan or worm that infects a PC
- DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) - an attack that knocks out a computer by overwhelming it with data; thousands of PCs can take part, hence the "distributed"
- Drive-by download - a virus or trojan that starts to install as soon as a user visits a particular website
- IP address - the numerical identifier every machine connected to the net needs to ensure data goes to the right place
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We offer majorly two types of advertising:
1. Sponsored Posts: If you are really interested in publishing a sponsored post or a press release, video content, advertorial or any other kind of sponsored post, then you are at the right place.
WHAT KIND OF SPONSORED POSTS DO WE ACCEPT?
Generally, a sponsored post can be any of the following:
Press release
Advertorial
Video content
Article
Interview
This kind of post is usually written to promote you or your business. However, we do prefer posts that naturally flow with the site’s general content. This means we can also promote artists, songs, cosmetic products and things that you love of all products or services.
DURATION & BONUSES
Every sponsored article will remain live on the site as long as this website exists. The duration is indefinite! Again, we will share your post on our social media channels and our email subscribers too will get to read your article. You’re exposing your article to our: Twitter followers, Facebook fans and other social networks.
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Submission of Materials : Sponsored post should be well written in English language and all materials must be delivered via electronic medium. All sponsored posts must be delivered via electronic version, either on disk or e-mail on Microsoft Word unless otherwise noted.
PRICING
The price largely depends on if you’re writing the content or we’re to do that. But if your are writing the content, it is $60 per article.
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Banner Size 300 X 250 pixels : Appears on the home page and below all pages on the site.
Banner Size 728 X 90 pixels: Appears on the top right Corner of the homepage and all pages on the site.
Large rectangle Banner Size (336x280) : Appears on the home page and below all pages on the site.
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Half page (300x600) : Appears on the right side of the home page and all pages on the site.
Portrait (300x1050) : Appears on the right side of the home page and all pages on the site.
Billboard (970x250) : Appears on the home page.
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