WordPress DoSnet
…or how to build your own WordPress-powered denial-of-service network
Pingbacks have been part of the WordPress since the very beginning. One of my previous articles, titled WordPress Pingback Attacks explores two types of denial-of-service attacks that leverage Pingback request processing in WordPress. If you do not know how Pingbacks work, I suggest taking a quick crash-course here.
One of the attacks is a Layer 7, direct denial-of-service attack, performed by a handful of machines targeted at a single WordPress XML-RPC server with pingbacks enabled. Its purpose is to deplete the server of memory resources by forcing it to download and parse a target URL, which is specifically crafted to heighten resource usage while parsing. Up to 6:1 peak-memory-usage-to-download-size ratios have been reliably reproduced. There’s a bug that allows 5 times as much usage (i.e. 30:1 inflation ratios) when setup properly (WordPress 3.4 will suffer from it as well).
The second attack is a Layer 4 (typically bandwidth-exhaustion), reflected distributed denial-of-service attack which utilizes publicly available WordPress sites on servers of any size and is the subject of this article. Buckle up, off we go.