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Denial of Service Attack (more or less)

Posted: Mon Nov 11, 2019 7:24 pm
by admin_jsfisher
If you check down near the bottom of the main page, there are some statistics there about how many are online currently and the peak number online at one time. Right now, it looks like this:
In total there are 18 users online :: 1 registered, 0 hidden and 17 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 3484 on Sun Nov 10, 2019 3:20 am
One or two registered users is typical. Some of the 17 guests are various web crawlers (such as Google's googlebot). The second line is far more interesting, though. We had 3,484 users online on November 10 (yesterday, at least yesterday as I write this). The little baby server that runs this forum should have caught fire and died under the load.

The heavy load continued through November 11 (today). And it wasn't because of some new-found interest in holography that instantly consumed the Internet. No, it was a massive number of malicious web crawlers that had an interest in our humble community.

That attack came from China. I don't know what drew their attention nor why they attacked in such great numbers, but the server is now dropping 65,536 Chinese IPv4 addresses, and that seems to have stopped the onslaught. (If anyone cares, I'm dropping the entire 159.138.0.0/16 address block.)

Re: Denial of Service Attack (more or less)

Posted: Tue Nov 12, 2019 2:26 am
by Nnnn
The site was extremely slow the last couple of days! I'm glad the cause was found and everything's OK now.

Kind of a strange target for a DDOS attack, but that explains what was going on at least.

Re: Denial of Service Attack (more or less)

Posted: Tue Nov 12, 2019 11:47 am
by Din
If it's of any interest, I'm receiving a number of emails with Chinese characters. I just mark them as 'junk'. But, I wonder why I'm receiving these Chinese emails, and is any other holographer also receiving such emails?

Re: Denial of Service Attack (more or less)

Posted: Tue Nov 12, 2019 5:25 pm
by lobaz
Thanks for solving the problem and keeping the forum alive!

Re: Denial of Service Attack (more or less)

Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2019 12:45 am
by Nnnn
Din wrote: Tue Nov 12, 2019 11:47 am If it's of any interest, I'm receiving a number of emails with Chinese characters. I just mark them as 'junk'. But, I wonder why I'm receiving these Chinese emails, and is any other holographer also receiving such emails?
If it means anything, I am not receiving chinese spam emails at the address I have registered to this account.