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.

ARPANET - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[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 did it just because it could, to 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.

 

[DutchDaemon]

Yep, somebody played with an Internet-facing fork-bomb.

 

[DutchDaemon]

We're also shoring up the rate-limiting features (source tracking rules) in pf.

 

[Al Seitsinger]

I don't get it. What is there to gain from making an army of bots attack the FreeBSD Forums? Nothing critical gets disrupted if these forums don't work for a while. No large media outlet is going to report on something like this. No cryptocurrency is going to change hands in the form of a ransom.

Was the attack wider and these forums just happened to be collateral victims?

Do they do these kinds of things as training exercises?

Perhaps it was just a petty person with an ax to grind because someone here was not nice to them and with access to a bot army (or enough money to rent one).

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I agree. We are reasonable minded people who aren't interested in breaking, sabotage, blackmail, theft, and more. These aren't cool people that do this.

I don't know much about cybersecurity.But a friend of mine used to run a personal website with minimum daily traffic.Yet it often got hammered by random DDoS attack.Sometimes it could be that they found a website without much protection and determined that an attack towards it might generate profit.

You should watch any WAN connection to see what a personal connection receives just because all addresses are predictable. Finding vulnerable systems with other systems is an unavoidable part of the public internet. I remember noticing how fast Sendmail found itself introducing my test server to a collection of connections within minutes of connection to the internet.

It's more likely kids trying to strut their stuff with their whacko friends. You know, the type on those Tor crazy cites and some sub-reddits. They're whacked in the head crazy but you'd never convince them of that till you get them in a psycho ward with a shrink when they break down crying about their childhood.

The DSM-X (or any book that we use to diagnose psychological disorders) should include this kind of deviant behavior so its easier to prosecute the people that do it.

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Everything is his fault.

With flaming swords and pitchforks.

Oh god. Please, not another.

 

[Applied Cybernetics]

Have had this happen before where they email posted contacts for a ransom payment, then demonstrate a "small" portion of their capability, and threaten to do it again if not paid.

It's a shame people still bother with such attacks.

 

[Crivens]

Oh god. Please, not another.

Sorry not sorry, that is exactly what IMHO has to happen. The internet is, by now, a critical infrastructure because it is used to control critical infrastructure. Messing with the internet should be seen on the same level as messing with the central water supply or power grid. Next year, when we will have a record summer again, imagine someone cutting of, say, manhatten from much of the power grid or water supply. Just for lolz. Or for money. It does not matter, but what would you deem a fitting punishment for that? A slap on the wrist? Twenty years of hard time in the big house? Public flogging? Because it has to be something, or we may see water being distributed from trucks next august.