As has been extensively publicized elsewhere, a very large scale botnet has been organized to attack sites using WordPress. This site has the dubious honor to have been included this last weekend.
The attack attempts to log in to the site using the user name “admin” or a number of variants on that name, then uses a dictionary of common passwords to try to brute force a log in. Attempts to thwart the attack by blocking individual IP addresses are a common response, but with over 1666 distinct IP addresses used in the attack anything short of automatic detection and blocking is more or less fruitless.
Some statistics:
- Total attempts: 2,291
- May 7 attempts: 241
- May 10 attempts: 1,285
- May 11 attempts: 792
Here’s a file containing the details, in the event that someone somewhere with the power to investigate these things might find it helpful Find Out More.