Wordpress has been hit by a large scale cyber attack, Digital Spy said.

The blogging website was struck by a botnet comprising "tens of thousands" of computers just one week after the service amped up its security.

The botnets attempt to steal user data by entering a list of common user names along with thousands of password combinations.

"One of the concerns of an attack like this is that the attacker is using a relatively weak botnet of home PCs in order to build a much larger botnet of beefy servers in preparation for a future attack," said Matthew Prince, co-founder of Wordpress hosting service Cloudflare.

"These larger machines can cause much more damage in DDoS [Distributed Denial of Service] attacks because the servers have large network connections and are capable of generating significant amounts of traffic.

Wordpress powers around 64 million blogs across the internet, which have a combined readership of around 371 million each month.