Ever since this blog started criticizing Automattic, it has been the target of several mild attacks. Over the weekend this changed. This site was victim of a vicious high volume attack exploiting the WordPress XML-RPC feature to ping other sites. This allowed the attacker not only to force this site to consume high resources and eventually try to bring it down, but to also abusively attack other WordPress sites that are innocent and have no relationship with this site.
/kudos @nearlyfreespeech Thanks for identifying and defeating the abuse and not just taking this site offline.
One would hope that someone employed by a company that seeks to “democratize publishing” would not be behind this.
But who knows?