iPage Addresses Attacks on WordPress Sites

Late Friday evening on April 12, 2013, iPage sent out an email to their customers informing and updating them on a recent “brute force attack” on WordPress sites across the internet. According to the email from iPage, this particular attack has over a hundred thousand computers in a botnet that is attempting to locate and compromise those WordPress sites that have simple passwords. Those sites would then probably be used to distribute malware.

iPage says they have identified a difference on how the attack accesses a WordPress site as opposed to a legitimate WordPress customer and have used this information to make changes to their network and infrastructure to mitigate the impact of this attack. iPage also strongly advises all customers to check their WordPress passwords and make sure they adhere to strong password guidelines.

I use iPage hosting for some of my websites and fortunately have not experienced any issues with this latest attack on WP sites. For more tips on how to secure your WP sites, see my post on WordPress Security.