Anyone that has a plugin that blocks an IP for so many minutes after x number of failed logins should be fine.
This is news because many hosts don't have protection in place for a flood protection or connection tracking. This recent wave is taking down servers because of high server loads. Especially on shared network hosts.
I didn't have one of my servers set up with connection tracking and sure enough a couple days ago I started receiving emails showing high server loads. I looked at the Apache log and saw IPs hitting WP sites with 100 login attempts in less than a minute.
These hackers are a little smarter (or dumber, depending on your viewpoint) and not using a block of IPs on one site which would trigger most flood protection mechanisms on servers these days. They're hitting a WP site with just a single IP hammering the login page so connection tracking on the server needs enabled that monitors each IP that visits the server.
Once you enable connection tracking these attacks are dead in the water. I have mine set to 8 hits a second before they're blocked and that put an end to them. Then are now banned before they get started and the server suffers almost no load from these attacks.
I know most of this is nonsense to those running WP on shared hosts but I typed it for those running dedis so they know what is going on and how to stop the high server load attacks. (well at least one way).
The hosts are mostly sending the notices to let customers know why their sites are going offline or running very slowly. The hosts should be blocking these brute force attacks by banning IPs that are abusing the server.
