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Who or what exactly might be conducting the current DDOS attack against PieFed.Social? (thelemmy.club)
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social
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EDIT: TBC, here's the current message seen when refreshing a PF stream:

"Piefed.social is having a denial of service attack. They are being kept at bay for now but could return with a more effective method. Download your community subscriptions so if you need to move to another server it’ll be painless - with a few clicks you’ll be seeing all the same content as before. See list of alternate servers at here or here."

Possible causes?

  • Fellow instance that got PO'd somehow? (seems like a major stretch)
  • Just random hackers havin' fun?
  • Reddit or similar, targeting one of the top growing instance softwares in ActivityPub / FV? EDIT2 : the timing certainly seems to fit for the recent influx of users coming from Reddit. (see comments)
  • Some right-wing entity, not happy about the general rational / left bias to the instance?
  • Other..?

In any case, much thanks to our instance runner and dev for fending off the first wave(!) Hope everything is backed up and possible to be restored if the worst happens.

(seriously, what a shitty way to be repaid for doing a great, ongoing job for the community and FOSS)

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[–] 3 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

A whois will likely not do much. It'll turn out to be some large ISP, which rents out virtual servers and all kind of stuff to private people, companies and VPN providers. And that's regularly how far you'll get, a name if a large company. And you can then decide if it's worth to take someone to court, somewhere abroad... (But sometimes an email to their abuse contact helps a bit. Judging by my experience they won't ever answer. But sometimes it'll miraculously stop. And most of the time nobody cares about a single complaint.)

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Would the Network Security Toolkit have anything that could help?

    I would imagine if they're on a VPN, which they honestly probably are, then there's not really a way to track them down at all...

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

    Well, I guess if they're still online and do silly stuff, like not use a VPN, not have a Firewall installed on their computer... Or they re-use the VPS which also has their personal blog on it... There would be ways to do something. But that's all very unlikely.

    I mean the whois is a good idea. Admins will usually want to know what they're dealing with, and where it's coming from. But the rest of the steps really depend on how bored an admin is. The best course of action regularly is to block it and move on. There's so much bad stuff hammering the average webserver anyway. Launching a counterattack is a bit illegal, so that might not be an option. And if some admin has a few hours to pass until it's 5pm and time to head home, or do it as a hobby and have time to spare they might investigate. I've found some hacked servers that way, wrote a few emails. But in practice, 99% of the time there isn't anything to accomplish.

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