« Articles / Ongoing DDOS

2025.06.15

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Since last weekend, we've had to put a large number of enormously wide IP blocks in place for the site and, more specifically, for the forum.

The attack began to tail off late last week but is still intermittently ongoing.

The attack has consisted of millions of attackers that I can see in AW Stats. They are targetting a large number of PHPBB installations, alongside Xenforo, as well as even forums that were written individually for their sites.

At the forum end, we can see that the attackers are trying to register bogus accounts, reset passwords and break into the user control panel etc. but none of that has worked for them here.

It's clear that the explanation that, for some reason, has been thrown around for these recent attacks: that this is companies scraping the forum to train AIs, is garbage.
Stunning the server with that many clients is so disproportionate and counterproductive to this stated objective that it can't seriously be held up as a way of disguising the true purpose.

About 80% of site admins reporting this issue that I've come across have switched over to using cloudflare to address the problem.
There are so many issues with using cloudflare when it comes to the integrity of user data that I'm actually staggered that as many site admins even seriously considered adopting it.

What I can say is that this site will *NEVER* use cloudflare or any similar 'service' where your client data is passed off to a 3rd party for them to decrypt, inspect and then, (if you're lucky) pass on to our server.
I would far rather see the site go under with 508 resource errors permanently than make that compromise.

If any legitimate user has trouble accessing the forum due to the huge range of IPs that I've blocked, please let me know and I'll just do a carve-out for you in htaccess to get you back in.

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