Multiple DDOS attacks threaten WordPress and int’l governments

In a day of multiple cyber-attacks across the web, WordPress, the government of South Korea and 29 international government agencies were threatened by DDOS attacks.

South Korea issued a cyber security alert as the websites of 29 government and other agencies came under attack Friday, the Korea Communications Commission said.

A commission spokesman said the DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks had initially been expected to hit 40 websites but only 29 were actually affected.

They included those of the presidential Blue House, the US forces, the military Joint Chiefs of Staff, the ministries of foreign affairs, defence and unification, parliament and the tax office.

“Some of the sites suffered minor access problems,” he said.

In recent hours, the WordPress.com service also suffered direct denial of service (DDoS) attacks, causing speed and performance issues across sectors of its network, affecting both the general user, as well as some of the VIP websites. Also briefly affected was the popular Akisment anti-spam plugin, used by WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress installs the world over. WordPress suspects that the attack was aimed at one of their non-English blogs, but didn’t identify the blog and couldn’t confirm their suspicions about the attack.

WordPress.com, the veritable flagship for multisite WordPress installations, is used by millions of digital citizens the world over, as well as many of the internet’s largest players, including CNN, Techrunch and, recently, Microsoft’s Windows Live blogs. With millions of pageviews across their network daily, WordPress.com is not only renouned as a prime use of WordPress, but also as a worldwide blogging community.