There is a super-botnet that is causing a great deal of concern for the WordPress company and for the 64 million sites that use their services to host their websites and blogs. A bot-net is a system of private computers that are compromised with malware and controlled remotely, without the computer owner’s permission or knowledge for nefarious purposes. Sometimes this network of computers is used to hack other computers, spread a virus or malware over a greater number of other private computers and eventually seize control a greater number of servers.
WordPress has reported a serious “super-botnet” that appears to be 90,000 networks strong, capable of testing two billion passwords each hour to enable a hack into other sites run by their network. These attacks are causing significant slow-downs in serviceand even locking administrators out of their own websites amongst those WordPress clients. This super-botnet even managed to hack into Matt Mullenweg’s blog, Mullenweg is the creator of WordPress. There are some ways you can prevent the hack from occurring and these are some quite simple steps to take.
First, change the default username you use as the administrator of your blog. Many people keep the default name assigned by the WordPress (among others) system of “Admin”. Use a phrase or word that isn’t immediately obvious, make sure you alternate with capital letters and lowercase as well as using numbers.
Second, change the password and make that too a phrase or word with alternating upper-case and lower-case letters and numbers even adding special characters can make it difficult for a hacker to guess and for a botnet to stumble onto.
Third use two-step authentication where you have to visually confirm an image or a set of numbers and letters. Fourth keep updating your WordPress software, hackers use the weaknesses in the older versions of the program.
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