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Who or what exactly might be conducting the current DDOS attack against PieFed.Social?
(media.piefed.social)
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)
Have you done any geolocation checking on the IPs? That might start to paint a better picture of the actor(s) behind the attack.
It's a good question...for rimu. I have ssh access to do things like restart the server or roll out a critical bugfix or something like that, but my sysadmin skills are not the best.
All you need is to have the IP addresses. If you can extract them, then the rest can be done by saying
whois ip.ad.re.ss(where you put some numbers between 0 and 255 instead of ip, ad, re and ss.)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.)
I'll ask him later when, hopefully, things will have had some time to cool down.