Caring for a Three Legged Dog or Cat

This is only for all you Tripawds Bloggers.

If you have received comments or pingbacks in your blog that direct you to a website discussing how your site was used in a DDoS attack, fear not! Your site was not compromised, nor was any site on the Tripawds network. We got your back.

First, you can simply spam and/or trash the comment.

Second, we have network-activated a plugin that removes the pingback/trackback functionality from WordPress.

This will basically remove the ability for other sites to "ping back" to any posts and pages on on the Tripawds Blogs network. We are still investigating if disabling XMLRPC will have any adverse affect on forum functionality (e.g.; subscriptions, notifications, feeds, etc.) so please let us know by replying below with any unexpected behavior.

What?

In short, the WordPress platform has been known for a long time to have a much debated vulnerability in its XMLRPC code that allows blogs to notify other blogs with trackbacks and pingbacks to linked content. Rest assured, this does not allow for sites to be compromised or "infected" in any way. Rather, it provides the ability for hackers to use numerous sites for DDoS attacks by directing huge amounts of traffic via pingbacks from legitimate websites.

Any questions?