Hundreds of Wordpress Blogs Hit by ‘Networkads.net’ Hack
A large number of bloggers using Wordpress are reporting that their sites recently were hacked and are redirecting visitors to a page that tries to install malicious software. — According to multiple postings on the Wordpress user forum …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second wave of WordPress security anxiety in seven months: last September, Robert Scoble publicly swore off the platform after hackers broke into his own WordPress installation, giving voice to a worry many self-hosted bloggers shared but few had documented.
What makes the networkads.net outbreak notable is its shape rather than its scale — hundreds of independent blogs redirecting visitors to the same malicious page implies attackers compromising the install base itself, not any single site, which lands squarely on the population least equipped to respond: hobbyists running their own servers.
First-order effects
- Affected bloggers face emergency cleanup on their own — restoring files, rotating credentials, and auditing plugins with no vendor incident response behind them, since self-hosted WordPress ships with no support contract.
- Every visitor to an infected blog during the window is exposed to a drive-by download attempt, turning each compromised site into unwitting malware distribution.
Second-order effects
- Hosting providers that market one-click WordPress installs inherit the support burden, as panicked customers escalate infections upstream and hosts weigh forced upgrade or quarantine policies for vulnerable accounts.
- Managed WordPress hosting and third-party hardening services gain a sales argument: the gap between 'free software you maintain yourself' and 'a platform someone else patches' becomes a priceable product feature.
Third-order effects
- If popular self-hosted publishing software keeps presenting a large, uniform attack surface, security responsibility migrates by attrition from individual operators toward hosts and platform vendors — a structural shift away from DIY administration for mainstream blogging.
- Attacks aimed at the install base rather than single sites push the ecosystem toward centralized update mechanisms and default-hardening, changing what 'running your own blog' means in practice.
The trend: Web publishing is drifting from self-administered open-source installs toward hosted platforms, driven less by features than by the mounting cost of ordinary users carrying their own security burden.