Webmasters who find an annoying error message on their sites may have caught a big break, thanks to a slip-up by the authors of the Gumblar botnet.

Tens of thousands of Web sites, many of them small sites running the WordPress blogging software, have been broken, returning a "fatal error" message in recent weeks. According to security experts those messages are actually generated by some buggy malicious code sneaked onto them by Gumblar's authors.

Gumblar made headlines in May when it appeared on thousands of legitimate Web sites, posting what's known as "drive-by download" code that attacks infected visitors with a variety of online attacks. The botnet had been quiet during July and August, but recently has begun infecting computers again.

Read more: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/110409-botnet-authors-crash-wordpress-sites.html