Late last week, the popular hosting service Wordpress had been hit by massive and sustained distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks
. It is unclear at this point why the site had been targeted, but rumours suggest the attacks were politically motivated.
While a Wordpress spokesperson originally surmised that the attacks were directed against one or more of its non-English blogs and not the platform itself, they are now suggesting the attacker may have been driven by business interests.
Today Wordpress claimed to have uncovered the culprit, a website in China which it has not yet named publicly.
As is always the case, attribution for such attacks is extraordinarily difficult. Although 98% of the DDoS traffic appears to have come from China, it is still uncertain that this is where the attack actually originated. In the bazaar of information warfare such attacks can be contracted out and are conducted by armies of compromised computers, known as a bot net, which can be directed remotely from a completely different location.
If the attacks are business-motivated, as Wordpress claims, it only raises more questions.