We’ve been under a DDoS attack for a few hours now. With peaks reaching 3.7M requests/hour, our server was unable to handle the traffic. Fortunately, thanks to last week’s upgrade (we have way more CPU+Memory than before), it didn’t crash but Discourse had to switch to a less dynamic mode - still not great.
I have re-activated CloudFlare (which I disabled 2 days ago to allow better websocket connections), and tried the regular blocks first like AI crawler blockers and rate limiters. All to no avail, so our last resort was to activate the ‘I am under attack’ option, which means you will see a verification page before you can enter the site. It’s annoying, but at least we can keep using BA.
I’ll keep an eye on the traffic and once I’m satisfied this attack is over I’ll return to our normal protections.
We have received no threats or demands, and I REALLY wonder who has beef with BA.
I think Newgrounds (the other site I regularly visit) is suffering from a similar or same DDoS attack. They always have to bully the little guys (the sites I actually enjoy and find community in), don’t they??
I have learned, sadly, that a large number of people, left to their own devices, will find nothing better to do than destroy everything around them.
Their motives vary from anger at perceived slights either by the site being attacked or by the world in general (and the site is just a big target) to the adrenaline rush of successfully impacting others.
Life is hard. Doing worthwhile things with your life is also hard.
Those of us who like to create and post pretty pictures we make are an odd bunch.
That’s a shame, hopefully it slows down and stops soon. I noticed this morning that BA seems to be loading quicker, but that might just be because of Cloudflare.
I seem to do that more and more as I get older. It seems I completely misread the intention of a question dragged up by the blenderbot on se and made a big answer, just to be called out on it by someone with no tact.
Now I’ve got to figure out a proper answer and correct it, lol.
That could be happening, I experienced that with a brand new website I setup once! There wasn’t even anything published on it, but from the moment I published the site it was under a DDoS attack. Turned out it used to host a website that had been under attack.
Reminds me of this old clip from Tech TV from when GRC was under attack:
