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.
This would probably be less useful than you think.
Firstly, changing the default doesn’t matter - the attackers will just switch to targeting whichever URL causes the most pain.
Secondly, in comparison to prerendered pages of live content, js files are incredibly cheap and easy to chuck on a CDN. They don’t change often, so you don’t need to worry about cache invalidation, and even at a server level they’re probably hosted by a simple file server rather than hitting the DB.
