Why Would Anyone Attack the FreeBSD Forums?

[drhowarddrfine]

It should be legally and internationally (without exceptions!) prohibited.

And actively pursued.

 

[Crivens]

And actively pursued.

With flaming swords and pitchforks.

 

[Phishfry]

Justice systems are so broken.
I think back to the day when you could attribute something to somebody.
When businesses had servers on site. When IP's were know endpoints.
Datacenters have enabled this anonymity that was never contemplated by the system originators.

 

[DutchDaemon]

Just to clear one thing up: these weren't AI/LLM crawlers, or crawlers per se.
These were bots requesting the front page (GET /) and immediately closing the connection to do it again and again and again.
This was done by several thousand IP addresses at the same time.
The only goal was to starve resources (Denial of Service) by constantly forcing the front page to be requested through PHP and MySQL. which blocked the pipeline and blocked TCP connections (80K - 100K open connections).
The server itself, while under load, was perfectly navigable for admins, and nothing went down or crashed.
As stated: we will simply take the forums offline and serve a static page when this happens again.
Nobody's life is lost, and it will only hurt temporarily.

 

[Maturin]

Just to clear one thing up: these weren't AI/LLM crawlers, or crawlers per se.
These were bots requesting the front page

So it was some immature childish mind ("script kiddy") who just because it could, it gave it a believe in having some power, while in fact it was nothing but a savage toddler smashing things. The fact this forums is of no political importance nor of any monetary value proves this.
How low. Pitiful, actually.