Recent DDoS attack on the Forums, your reaction?

[Twilight Sparkle ✨ 8,520]

Reading through this thread's responses is very interesting to me, particularly considering how brief that attack was in comparison to those weeks of May (a couple of hours vs. two weeks). MLP Forums must have lodged itself quite deep in some of your personal lives for this topic to produce some of the responses it has.

 

My personal reaction, in case anyone's curious, went along the lines of: "WTF is this SYN flood doing here? *groan* Not again..."

 

Fortunately, the attack was not even close to the same league as what hit us in May. I was able to set up some effective countermeasures against it, although said countermeasures did have the unfortunate side effect of making MLP Forums load slowly and hang for some users until I deemed it safe to disable them again.

 

I am used to this forum going down now. I knew that it would be back up eventually, so, like usual, I didn't worry about it.

 

It (going down on occasion) happens to most forums I visit anyway.

 

There was only a two-week period during which that wave of large DDoS attacks hit us. MLP Forums hasn't had any other unscheduled downtime apart from then... it worries me that MLP Forums going down seems like a "usual event" for you.

 

 

I'm used to it, mostly from other forums. I refresh once, and if it doesn't work, then I know my Internet isn't just being wonky, and I'll try again later.

 

It could always be much worse though, way back in 2009, Sonic Stadium, a huge unofficial Sonic website, was taken down. It was all because the hosting company terminated their account. Basically, all content was gone, and the only backups that existed were of the main site, none for the forums. (Although later it was speculated that some admins had copies...)

 

Either way, I always try to think positive, a DDoS or any attack could be much worse. Thankfully, the team here already knows how to deal with it, so in my opinion, it doesn't seem like a huge thing like before, but now its just an annoyance.

 

It is unfortunate that Sonic Stadium lost their entire forums to a billing mishap. Part of the reason I never trust automatic payments is because that is by far not the only incident of its kind I've seen - for example, XenForo's domain expired when their automatic renewal didn't renew xenforo.com for them, making the site cease to exist for a couple of days.

 

With that said, there's really no excuse for a reputable community to not have a decent backup system in place. If it reassures anyone, MLP Forums is backed up every night from its web server to a backup server in another city, with a different hosting company. A one-way link exists between the servers, making it damned near impossible for an attacker to delete or even access the backups. Fortunately, a DDoS doesn't even penetrate anything. It's little more than a nuisance, but it can be a damned annoying one if you don't have enough hardware in place to deal with it.

 

If MLP Forums was going down for an extended period of time and I knew it, I'd make an announcement.

[Abstract 831]

Seems to happen on a semi-regular basis. Not a big deal, really. I can go without MLPForums for a little while... But not for too long.

[Twilight Sparkle ✨ 8,520]

Seems to happen on a semi-regular basis. Not a big deal, really. I can go without MLPForums for a little while... But not for too long.

 

Semi-regular basis? We've been attacked twice... if you're noticing any downtime outside of the two DDoS attacks on us, I really want to know about it.

[Abstract 831]

Semi-regular basis? We've been attacked twice... if you're noticing any downtime outside of the two DDoS attacks on us, I really want to know about it.

 

It's happened at least two or three times that I could not access the site (briefly) since I joined back in mid-May. But that could have easily been related to problems on my end as well, and not yours. My internet access consists of tethering through my phone, and we all know cellular connections can be unreliable at times.

[Kapi 213]

It is unfortunate that Sonic Stadium lost their entire forums to a billing mishap. Part of the reason I never trust automatic payments is because that is by far not the only incident of its kind I've seen - for example, XenForo's domain expired when their automatic renewal didn't renew xenforo.com for them, making the site cease to exist for a couple of days.

 

With that said, there's really no excuse for a reputable community to not have a decent backup system in place. If it reassures anyone, MLP Forums is backed up every night from its web server to a backup server in another city, with a different hosting company. A one-way link exists between the servers, making it damned near impossible for an attacker to delete or even access the backups. Fortunately, a DDoS doesn't even penetrate anything. It's little more than a nuisance, but it can be a damned annoying one if you don't have enough hardware in place to deal with it.

 

I remember with XenForo, didn't the same thing happen to passport.com (Microsoft PAssport) back in the early 2000's? I remember reading about hotmail.co.uk going down because Microsoft forgot to pay for the domain, but didn't it also happen to Passport?

 

Its cool to know that if something catastrophic happens to MLPForums, there's always a copy. Plus, I'm sure if the site went down for 2 weeks again, everyone would still be able to contact each other, maybe through a temp forum or e-mail, etc. At least this time, we'd be prepared for it(And actually kind of expect it)

 

EDIT:

It's happened at least two or three times that I could not access the site (briefly) since I joined back in mid-May. But that could have easily been related to problems on my end as well, and not yours. My internet access consists of tethering through my phone, and we all know cellular connections can be unreliable at times.

 

My Internet provider, Service Electric, is pretty good at randomly cutting my Internet for about 2-3 minutes every so often. Sometimes it lasts for 2 or more hours. The service is through PennTeleData, and their tech team is soooooo good, they don't ever seem to notice there's a problem, until I tell them the lights on my modem are out. Either way, it could just be your service, and not MLPForums.

Edited September 12, 2012 by Kapi

[Bowser 49]

well i was on xbox while this was going on but..

i talked to some people on the forums blaming all of this on scootacool but eh who knows.

[Mephala 2,633]

Oh, so that was it. I guessed correctly.

I just kept on and carried calm kept calm and carried on as usual, albeit a little bit slower.

[Some_random_guy 1,857]

It only went down for a Minute for me

I was somehow still able to access the site and post a bit but I couldn't Upload Pictures or look at notifications cause it would Crash.

[ToridAkbolto 170]

Take some time to think about life. Take some time to play a couple games. Basically, when my excuse for not studying is unavailable, I come up with some other ones.

[Angie Cakes 50]

ah, so this ISN'T a regular event here? .-. the other pony forum I go to is a lot like this one in many ways, only has about half as many members and goes down at LEAST once a month. there was a time period where it went down every evening for weeks. this site went down so soon after I joined, that I assumed it was just as regular here as it was back there. actually, I'd assumed that the fact that there's twice as many members would mean it would go down more often than my other forum. nice to know I won't be dealing with as much downtime here as I'm used to XD

[Nah 3,181]

No prob, after all, it's your choice to go do something stupid like a DDoS attack, your choice to get into trouble.

 

Possible reasons for a DDoS:

 

Haters wanting to rustle our jimmies

 

Randomly chosen in hopes of acquiring personal info

 

No reason

 

Thankfully, Feld0 did a good job.

[One 498]

I was busy with school, so didn't notice anything. Find it funny someone would DDoS this site, must be haters. As long as they don't take it down for a week I'm fine, and if they do, then I'll just play Playstation, and if that gets hacked again...I'm gonna kill someone.

[Miss Light Diamond 2,801]

I was like "NOOOOOOOOO, DAMN YOU COMPUTER... yea I thought it was my internet and then I went to youtube and figured out it was the forums so I knew Feld0 and all the other alicorns would be able to figure it all out.

Edited September 12, 2012 by Flame Dancer

[Juggler 345]

Fortunately, I was away on vacation when this happened so I didn't experience it. And I'm glad that I didn't, I can't swear that my computer would be in one piece if I did