Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com (not to be confused with the WordPress.org project), announced that the firm had acquired BruteProject, one of the many thousand plugins and services that reside in the WordPress ecosystem.
Mullenweg also revealed a number of interesting stats; 8.6 billion Gravatars are served every day and 450TB of data are pushed from nine datacentres globally every day by Automattic.
As for BruteProject, it provides with an array of maintenance services that will be merged in JetPack, WordPress.com's own utility kit, which is free to use.
Installed more than 116,000 websites globally, Bruteforce prevents BFAs (Brute Force attacks), offers multisite protection, auto remote upadts and monitoring, uptime monitoring, malware scanning and blacklist warnings as well.
A potential acquisition target?
Automattic has been on a shopping spree; it acquired a website builder, Scroll Kit, earlier this year and shut it down shortly afterwards. Other notable acquisitions include Longreads, After The Deadline, IntenseDebate, PollDaddy, and blogging application, Poster.
The company, which was founded nine years ago, rasised a whopping $160 million (about £100 million, AU$ 180 million) back in May 2014, valuing the company at more than $1 billion (about £600 million, AU$ 1.1 billion).
WordPress.com is used by 22% of all websites globally and nearly 410 million people view more than 15.5 billion pages hosted on WordPress.com sites; these generate 42 million new posts and almost 61 million comments every month.
