<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\nFor the last two days people have been sending me messages in email, Twitter, and Facebook. These messages invariably come in one of two forms:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Hey Shamus! Did you know your website is down, or that it’s very slow?\n
- Shamus, I just wanted to let you know that there’s a massive brute-force attack of WordPress websites<\/a> going on right now.\n<\/ol>\n
These messages are probably related.<\/p>\n
Remember that a botnet is a bunch of hacked, trojan’d, malware-infected machines. The machines are in living rooms, in classrooms, in offices. Their owners probably have no idea they’re infected. Maybe they were on some skeezy porn site. Or torrenting things they shouldn’t. Or maybe they clicked on one of those “Optimize your PC” scams. Whatever. The owners shrug, “That machine is slow these days.” <\/p>\n
This is a brute-force attack, which means thousands of different computers are going to thousands of different blogs and attempting to gain admin privileges using stupid, you-should-know-better credentials. My blog isn’t at any particular risk. While you can never say never, I shouldn’t be susceptible to brute-force over any kind of a reasonable timeframe. My password is what it should be: Long alphanumeric gibberish. It sucks to remember, but it ought to keep me safe for the next few hundred years or so<\/a>. <\/p>\n
This is a friendly reminder to encourage your less-savvy friends to keep their machine clean. Their ignorance and hapless surfing habits are now a danger to everyone. This attack wouldn’t be worth it if large numbers of people didn’t use horrible passwords, and it wouldn’t be possible if large numbers of people didn’t allow their machines to be compromised. The un-savvy are now providing the incentive and the means for their own undoing. <\/p>\n
So yes. I know. Nothing I can do on my end. I could spend hours scouring logs and banning IP’s, but I’d just be banning individual members of an amorphous blob. The best solution is to complain until the whole thing blows over.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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