Today, like the past few days, we have had some downtime. Apparently some script kids are enjoying themselves by targeting our server (and others). Sorry for the inconvenience.
Most of these ‘attacks’ are targeted at the database, but some are more ddos-like and can be mitigated by using a CDN. Some other Lemmy servers are using Cloudflare, so we know that works. Therefore we have chosen Cloudflare as CDN / DDOS protection platform for now. We will look into other options, but we needed something to be implemented asap.
For the other attacks, we are using them to investigate and implement measures like rate limiting etc.
I don’t understand why people want to take down websites. Especially sites like Lemmy, which isn’t exactly sticking it to anyone because no one owns it!
Are they just Reddit groupies?
For most hackers or wanna-bes (often called Script Kiddies, that is, people (generally young, even children thus the “Kiddies”) who are not technologically inclined enough to be real hackers and see a tutorial online on how to run pre-written scripts that repeatedly perform various functions), the answer to “Why do you do it?” is often:
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“Because I was bored.”
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“Because I can.”
Very rarely are other reasons given.
If I’m bored I find something productive and/or fun to do.
Launching a DDoS attack is neither.
Nah, it’s not the 00s anymore. Hacker gangs are a real thing today.
I’m not actually in the security field so take this with a grain of salt. But I believe that these attacks play a similar role to random attacks in low level gangs. It proves that your criminal group has power and the ability to deface a website.
So if you publish that Lemmy.world will go down next week because your hackers are on it… It’s advertising. Its just business. It proves that your hackers have an ability and that you are up for sale.
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…
I was using voip.ms last year when they were DDoS’d for over a week, by a group demanding payment via anonymous crypto. The DDoS ended when they switched to CloudFlare (which was probably pretty difficult because they’re a SIP provider.)
Almost any website with a small number of servers is vulnerable to this attack, which happens to be great business for CloudFlare. I wonder which companies are most effectively competing with CloudFlare?
There are others, but I think the craziest thing about Cloudflare is its basic level of protection is free. Free, unmetered, DDOS protection. It’s so popular because so many hobbyists use it for free, and are familiar with it. Then they convince their workplaces to adopt it when the need arises because they are already familiar with it.
They make money by selling support to companies, and selling access to some more advanced features (that often have a free tier as well). It’s honestly so impressive, it made me wonder how much they actually make because it seems unnecessary for most to pay at all. Turns out they cleared almost a billion dollars in revenue in 2022.
They’re just trolls. Lemmy is popular enough that it’s fun target for them, but still small and infantile enough that you don’t have to be hackerman to ddos it. Reddit, twitter, etc… would be constantly getting ddos’d just for the lulz by people if they didn’t have the infrastructure to make it a challenge.
With my tinfoil hat on, I’d say one concern is that Cloudfare is basically a monopoly and nothing is stopping them from DDoSing sites to force them to use their product.
While it’s good to be suspicious, I don’t think we can call CloudFlare a monopoly quite yet.
Akamai is a big, giant competitor. You also have the big cloud providers like AWS that have their own CDN systems, like CloudFront. (I don’t recall GCP’s or Azure’s product names.) Then you have specialized CDNs like Google’s AMP system.
Now, is it possible that there could be a horizontal trust between these companies? Certainly. There’s few enough players for that to happen, but so far, I haven’t seen signs of it happening.
