#DDoS (distributed denial-of-service)

[sasquapossum]

Looks like my ex-boss Bobby Kotick is presiding over another debacle. I'll leave the "ex-boss" and "another" parts for another post some day.) Just last night, I was commenting (on Mastodon) about how Diablo IV was fun, but the experience was degraded by the decision to go the cooperative-MMO route instead of staying true to the franchise's nature. I was particularly focused on two things.

Requiring a constant connection also means there's no pause, which I need to use often when my family comes in asking questions or needing help with something.

Even more annoying, the "cooperative" part seems to mean that many bosses are not reasonably solo-able. I'm sure I'll get past this by grinding for better gear etc. but the design seems based on an assumption of at least two-person parties. Unless the bosses auto-scale to party size as well as level.

How did game design, of all things, get so dominated by extroverts? I know Blizzard is just responding to the market, but the market in terms of what makes them money is not the same as the market in terms of what people actually want. That's a whole different rant, though. I'm already doubling up, so I'll let that one pass. Meanwhile, on to the problems with always-online games.

This morning, battle.net (Blizzard's Steam-wannabe) servers have been under a persistent distributed denial-of-service attack. I've heard that the bevy of miscreants that call themselves Poodlecorp are behind it. In any case, the game's unplayable.

This is such a self-inflicted injury. If the game was designed properly, so that a connection wasn't required except when doing specific things like forming parties or buying stuff from stores, most players wouldn't even notice. However, because of Bobby's bad decision (and this one must surely have gone up to his level) this means every player is locked out until the mitigate the DDoS. What a total travesty.

[carlocarrasco]

Over 3 million cyber-attacks counted by COMELEC

In relation to the recently concluded National and Local Elections, the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) confirmed that there were more than three million cyber-attacks on their official website and precinct finder apps, according to a news report by The Manila Times. To put things in perspective, posted below is an excerpt from the news report of The Manila Times. Some parts in boldface… THE…

[hargo-news]

Serangan Digital ke Media Siber Merupakan Bentuk Kekerasan Terhadap Pers

Hargo.co.id, JAKARTA – Yayasan Tifa, Perhimpunan Pengembangan Media Nusantara (PPMN), dan Human Rights Working Group (HRWG) meluncurkan skor terbaru Indeks Keselamatan Jurnalis di Indonesia, di Jakarta Selatan, pada Kamis (20/2/2025). Riset ini menyimpulkan skor keselamatan jurnalis selama 2024 lalu adalah 60,5 poin atau masuk kategori “agak terlindungi”. Peluncuran indeks ini bertepatan dengan…

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Matt Wuerker. Politico

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 11, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Mar 12, 2025

The stock market continued to fall today. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell another 478 points, or 1.14%; the S&P 500 fell almost 0.8%; and the Nasdaq Composite fell almost 0.2%. The S&P 500 briefly held its own in trading today, but then Trump announced on his social media platform that he was going to double the tariffs on steel and aluminum from the new 25% rates to a 50% rate on Canada and might increase tariffs to “permanently shut down the automobile manufacturing business in Canada.”

Stocks fell again.

Unable to admit that he might be wrong, President Donald Trump is doubling down on the policies that are crashing the economy. In addition to his tariff threats, he also reiterated that “the only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State,” an outrageous position that he suddenly began to advance after the 2024 presidential election and which has Canadians so furious they are boycotting U.S. goods and booing the Star-Spangled Banner.

More than 100 top business leaders met with Trump today to urge him to stop destabilizing what had been a booming economy with his on-again-off-again tariffs. Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, told Jeff Stein and Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post that in private, “[b]usiness leaders, CEOs and COOs are nervous, bordering on unnerved, by the policies that are being implemented, how they’re being implemented and what the fallout is. There’s overwhelming uncertainty and increasing discomfort with how policy is being implemented.”

The extreme unpredictability means that no one knows where or how to invest. Market strategist Art Hogan told CNN’s Matt Egan, “This market is just blatantly sick and tired of the back and forth on trade policy.” Yesterday, Delta Air Lines cut its forecasts for its first-quarter revenue and profits by half, a sign of weakening corporate and consumer confidence and concerns about the safety of air travel. Today, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines cut their forecasts, and American Airlines forecast a first-quarter loss.

When he talked to reporters, Trump reasserted that he intends to do what he wants regardless of the business leaders’ input. “Markets are going to go up and they’re going to go down, but you know what, we have to rebuild our country. Long-term what I’m doing is making our country strong again.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt advised, “If people are looking for certainty, they should look at the record of this president.”

Not everyone will find that suggestion comforting.

Trump backed off on his threat to raise the tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum to 50%, but went ahead with his threat to place 25% tariffs on all imported steel and aluminum products. Those tariffs took effect at midnight.

In the face of his own troubles, Trump’s sidekick billionaire Elon Musk is also escalating his destructive behavior. Yesterday Musk’s social media platform X underwent three separate outages that spanned more than six hours. Lily Jamali and Liv McMahon of the BBC reported that Oxford professor Ciaran Martin, former head of the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Center, said that the outages appear to have been an attack called a “distributed denial of service,” or DDoS, attack. This is an old technique in which hackers flood a server to prevent authentic users from reaching a website.

"I can't think of a company of the size and standing internationally of X that's fallen over to a DDoS attack for a very long time," Martin said. The outage "doesn't reflect well on their cyber security." Without any evidence, Musk blamed hackers in Ukraine for the outages, an accusation Martin called “pretty much garbage.”

Four days ago, another of Musk’s SpaceX rockets exploded after takeoff, and now SpaceX’s Starlink internet service is facing headwinds. In February, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim canceled his collaborations with Starlink after growing tensions with Musk culminated with Musk alleging on X that Slim is tied to organized crime. The loss of that deal cost Musk about $7 billion in the short term, but more in the long term as Slim will work with European and Chinese companies in 25 Latin American countries rather than Starlink. Slim has said he would invest $22 billion in those projects over the next three years.

Also in February, after U.S. negotiators threatened to cut Ukraine’s access to the 42,000 Starlink terminals that supply information to the front lines, the European Commission began to look for either government or commercial alternatives. The European Commission is made up of a college of commissioners from each of the 27 European Union countries. It acts as the main executive branch of the European Union.

On Sunday, Musk posted: “[M]y Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army. Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.” Poland pays for about half the Starlink terminals in Ukraine, about $50 million a year. Poland’s minister of foreign affairs, Radosław Sikorski, responded that “if SpaceX proves to be an unreliable provider we will be forced to look for other suppliers.” “Be quiet, small man,” Musk replied. “You pay a tiny fraction of the cost. And there is no substitute for Starlink.”

After all the tariff drama with Canada, last week Ontario also cancelled a deal it had with Starlink.

But perhaps the biggest hit Musk has taken lately is over his Tesla car brand. On February 6, Musk’s younger brother Kimbal, who sits on Tesla’s board, sold more than $27 million worth of shares in the company. Tesla chair Robyn Denholm sold about $43 million worth of Tesla stock in February and recently sold another $33 million. Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja has sold $8 million worth over the past 90 days. Yesterday, board member James Murdoch sold just over $13 million worth of stock.

Fred Lambert of Electrek, which follows the news about electric vehicles and Tesla, noted that Tesla stock dropped 15% yesterday, “down more than 50% from its all-time high just a few months ago.” “Tesla insiders are unloading,” he concluded.

Tesla sales are dropping across the globe owing to the unpopularity of Musk’s antics, along with the cuts and data breaches from his “Department of Government Efficiency.” Protesters have been gathering at Tesla dealerships to express their dismay. While the protests have been peaceful, as Chris Isidore of CNN reports, there have also been reports of vandalism. Tesla owners are facing ridicule as protesters take out their anger toward Musk on his customers, and at least one competitor is working to lure consumers away from Musk’s brand by offering a discount to Tesla owners.

Trump has jumped to Musk’s defense, posting just after midnight this morning that “Elon Musk is ‘putting it on the line’ in order to help our Nation, and he is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! But the Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the World’s great automakers, and Elon’s ‘baby,’ in order to attack and do harm to Elon, and everything he stands for. They tried to do it to me at the 2024 Presidential Ballot Box, but how did that work out? In any event, I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American.”

Indeed, today Trump used the office of the presidency to bolster Musk’s business. Teslas were lined up at the White House, where Trump read from a Tesla sales pitch—photographer Andrew Harnik caught an image of his notes. And then the same man who gave a blanket pardon to those convicted of violent crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol called those protesting at Tesla dealerships “domestic terrorists” and promised that the government would make sure they “go through hell.”

Trump and Musk appear to have taken the downturn in their fortunes by becoming more aggressive. Martin Pengelly of The Guardian noted that in the middle of Monday’s stock market plunge, Trump posted or reposted more than 100 messages on his social media channel. All of them showed him in a positive light, including reminders of the 2004 first season of the television show The Apprentice, in which Trump starred: a golden moment in Trump’s past when his ratings were high and the audience seemed to believe he was a brilliant and powerful businessman.

Today, egged on by Musk, Trump pushed again to take over other countries. He told reporters: "When you take away that artificial line that looks like it was done with a ruler…and you look at that beautiful formation of Canada and the United States, there is no place anywhere in the world that looks like that…. And then if you add Greenland…that's pretty good."

The Trump administration also announced today it was cutting about half the employees in the Department of Education. The Senate confirmed Linda McMahon, who has little experience with education, to head the department on March 3 by a party-line vote. Shutting down the department "was the president's mandate—his directive to me," McMahon told Fox News Channel host Laura Ingraham. McMahon assured Ingraham that existing grants and programs would not “fall through the cracks.”

But when Ingraham asked her what IDEA stood for—the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act—she wasn’t sure, although she knew it was “the programs for disabled and needs.” Ingraham knew what the acronym meant but assured McMahon that after 30 years on the job, she still didn’t know all the acronyms. McMahon replied: “This is my fifth day on the job and I’m really trying to learn them very quickly.”

Musk lashed out at Arizona senator Mark Kelly on social media yesterday, after Kelly posted pictures of his recent trip to Ukraine and discussed the history of Russia’s invasion, concluding “it’s important we stand with Ukraine.” Musk responded: “You are a traitor.”

Kelly, who was in the Navy for 25 years and flew 39 combat missions in the Gulf War before becoming an astronaut, responded: “Traitor? Elon, if you don’t understand that defending freedom is a basic tenet of what makes America great and keeps us safe, maybe you should leave it to those of us who do.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[sreegs]

What is DDOSing? And i guess why is it bad that it's how Twitter is stopping people from using it?

'DOS' stands for Denial of Service. It's an attack where a malicious actor uses one machine to repeatedly make requests of an online service in order to tie up its resources and degrade its service.

'DDOS' means Distributed Denial of Service. It's the same thing except the attacker uses multiple machines or at least multiple clients, usually distributed across multiple locations, to do the same thing except now it's harder to shut out the attacker. It's also usually much higher volume of requests so the scale is bigger.

Basically what happened is Twitter rate limited users from reading too many tweets. However they didn't change their own client (the website or app) to account for this, so the twitter clients kept getting errors and automatically retrying. They DDOSed themselves because their own client was repeatedly making requests that were being blocked for rate limiting. And whenever the client received a rate limit error they would retry the same request again and again and again. Their own users were doing this without being aware and not at any fault of their own. All they had to do is just go to twitter.

[mudwerks]

(via 'Garbage' to blame Ukraine for massive Twitter outage, experts say)

However, Ciaran Martin, professor at Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government told the BBC that explanation was "wholly unconvincing" and "pretty much garbage."

Prof Martin - former head of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre - says it looks as if Twitter was targeted by what's known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, where hackers flood a server with internet traffic to prevent users from connecting to a website.

"It's not that sophisticated - it's a very old technique," Mr Martin told Radio 4's Today programme.

"I can't think of a company of the size and standing internationally of Twitter that's fallen over to a DDoS attack for a very long time," he added.

He said the incident at Twitter "doesn't reflect well on their cyber security."

[payblogs]

STARKSTRESSER -PLATİN

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Stresser

A stresser is an online tool designed primarily for testing the resilience of networks and servers against various types of attacks. It simulates Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which can overwhelm a server by flooding it with traffic, and it is crucial for organizations to understand how resilient their infrastructure is to such threats. Using a stresser can help businesses identify vulnerabilities in their systems and improve security measures.

However, it's essential to note that the ethical use of stress testing tools is paramount. Users should only test devices and networks they own or have explicit permission to test. Misuse of a stresser can lead to legal consequences, including potential fines and imprisonment.

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Ip Stresser

An IP stresser is a tool or service designed to test the resilience of a network or website against various types of stress attacks. Often utilized by web administrators and security professionals, an IP stresser can simulate considerable traffic to help evaluate the potential vulnerabilities of a specific IP address or server. This testing can help organizations strengthen their defenses against actual malicious attacks.

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Another vital aspect to consider is the choice between premium and free IP stressers. While free versions can be tempting due to their no-cost nature, they often come with limitations in terms of performance and reliability. Paid options typically provide more robust features, better support, and a more reliable service, making them suitable for serious testing purposes.

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Ip Stresser Free

When it comes to stress testing your server or network, finding an ip stresser free option can be appealing for many users. Free IP stress testing services, commonly known as stresser tools, offer a way for individuals to test the resilience of their networks without incurring any costs. However, it is crucial to be aware of the risks and limitations associated with these free options.

These services typically have a limited capacity compared to their paid counterparts, which may restrict the intensity of the tests you can perform. Users should also consider the legality and ethical implications of using such tools, as testing without permission can result in significant legal troubles.

Moreover, relying on an ip booter or free stresser might expose your network to potential vulnerabilities, including the risk of data breaches or exposure to malicious attacks. Therefore, it’s advisable to conduct thorough research and choose reputable providers when selecting an ip stresser free option.

In conclusion, while free stresser tools might seem like an appealing solution, always prioritize security and legality by using these tools responsibly and considering paid services for more comprehensive testing solutions.

Ip Booter

An IP booter is a specialized tool designed to perform Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks by overwhelming a specific target IP address with excessive traffic. The idea is to disrupt the target's online services, making them unavailable for legitimate users. Booters have gained popularity in certain circles, particularly within gaming communities, where individuals seek to retaliate against others by interrupting their connection.

It's important to distinguish between legitimate use and malicious intent. There are instances where individuals may seek to test the robustness of their own networks or those for whom they have explicit permission. However, the use of IP booters against unsuspecting targets is generally illegal and unethical. Many countries have strict laws against unauthorized DDoS attacks, which can lead to severe penalties.

In addition to the ethical concerns, users should be wary of utilizing free ip booter, as they often compromise security. Free services may expose users to malware, phishing attempts, and data breaches. For those considering a stresser or IP stresser, prioritizing reputable and secure services is crucial, ensuring that they comply with legal standards and best practices in cybersecurity.

In conclusion, while the allure of using an IP booter may be tempting, it is essential to recognize the potential consequences—both legally and ethically. Responsible internet usage and adherence to laws protect not only individuals but the entire online community.

[porterdavis]

DDoS = distributed denial of service

[fallloverfic]

Thoughts on To Be Hero X Episode 11: Road to the Crown

That was a fun episode :D

Listening to Queen's speech and noting how she made some good points about the issues with heroes (e.g., they're useful, but they also fight each other, which creates problems) without substance to back up her confidence in her own abilities at heroism (other than academics, which doesn't really seem to have anything to do with heroing here), but noting she was at least inspiring other women, and having that actually be part of the point was fascinating. It wasn't exactly Queen's point, but I did appreciate how the idea was that she was, unintentionally, inspiring other women to... I don't like saying "work harder" because they were likely already working hard. And the reason the numbers are probably so skewed in TBHX world for hero numbers is probably similar to normal world numbers: women are already overworked, undersupported, and not given the chances men are, so of course fewer of them succeed. I mean obviously when power is based on Trust and people believing in you, fewer women in a patriarchal society are going to get that. But Queen was at least maybe inspiring some folks to push harder, which is nice. I appreciate the bartender. You tell off those dickish drunks.

I also appreciated the emphasis on how male these industries are: you have men being talk show hosts, reporters, podcasters, and heads of companies, in rooms seemingly entirely absent of women, with a heavy atmosphere of sexism if not misogyny. Patriarchy is systemic, and again, that's part of how women are so excluded: men are allowed to be mediocre (and set the stage for how women do things). Women have to try far harder to get the bare minimum.

I wonder if we'll get to see the previous female X from/before Year 8. That'd be interesting.

The Johnnies are interesting. Not much else to say about them.

Extro/Smile definitely seems a bit off, so I can understand interacting with him making Nice lose it for some reason.

I like Bowa's hero costume. It kind of gives valkyrie vibes mixed with Hawkgirl's/Shayera Hol's costume in Justice League Unlimited.

I mean it's really just a workout uniform, but well... Bowa and Shayera make it work!

Love a female fighter with a giant weapon (thinking of Balsa from Seirei no Moribito and Red from Transistor). Also her fight with Extro is really cool.

I'm not entirely sure what Queen's powers are, but it looks like a mix of being able to manipulate gravity in a defined space, based on setting the "rules" of the space, which is always pretty fun. I like heroes who do the "I set the rules here" thing.

Mickey is a certified creep, of course. I'm glad Queen kind of(?) stood up for Bowa, rather than just letting Bowa suffer. The way to beat the patriarchy is not to destroy each other, but to support each other. Sadly, Bowa has not internalized this. Support your shimei, Bowa T-T

Queen being unable to resist Big Johnny('s cuteness) is very funny lol Less so when you think about what johnny is a euphemism for.

(Also they finally released the full version of My Color)

I can't look at DOS' logo without seeing a weird version of the Bitcoin logo. It's deeply distracting, especially because just the name alone makes me think of distributed denial-of-service ("DDOS") attacks.

I just want to know why they keep calling him Mr. Shand and not Mr. Shang? Is it just some weird transliteration thing with the Chinese? It's not just the regular subtitles: the animated English subtitles in the episode are also spelling it "Shand".

(Tumblr is being a piece of shit and not letting me add alt text so here's the English: "MG executive, Shand, resigns and establishes Treeman Corporation")

If it was just the regular subtitles, I'd assume it's something wonky, like what happened with the Heaven Official's Blessing English subs (which seemed to be machine translation), but that doesn't seem to be what's happening.

This sentence is so silly and I can only imagine is meant to be satirical: "FOMO has provided people with a more convenient method of communication, allowing even regular people to showcase themselves wherever, whenever." I know FOMO is a company, not just the concept, "Fear of missing out", but it's very silly.

Why is Cardcaptor Sakura here????

He's here at last!!!

The "nobody" lol Using his magic tricks to get everyone. I hate that we don't even see the fight and the episode actually makes me feel bad for feeling frustrated with that, because it's kind of pointing out the toxic patriarchy: some random dude walks in off the street and "easily" beats two of the strongest registered female fighters, including X. Ah well. It's just Katanagatari all over again lol

He looks great in 2D, still. If you haven't seen his intro video, you should. The song is still amazing and the animation is wonderful.

I love the idea that X maybe hates the system as it exists and that's why he's leaving his rooms alone. Not just that he doesn't trust the system, but also that he kind of actively wants to mess with it. So he's letting it return to nature. Abandoning it.

Overall, a great episode with lots of fun stuff and lore :3

Episode 12 looks fun! More Queen and Cyan bonding. Queen and Bowa fighting... Fun times!

More thoughts:

Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3, Episode 4, Episode 5, Episode 6, Episode 7, Episode 8, Episode 9, Episode 10, Episode 11 (You are here), Episode 12

[schroedingerscryptid]

good evening mothers and fuckers of the jury today i bring: Amphoreus Is A Neural Network 

my credentials: i’m a first year CS student in 2025.

if y’all’ve been on hsrtwt in the past few days and watching leak after leak come out, then you probably know what i’m yapping about. if not, check this, this, this, and this out.

if you’d rather wait for 3.4 to come out, this is your chance to scroll. rest of y’all are with me lets go gamers

to summarise the 3.4 leaks, lygus and cyrene are apparently running tests on phainon to make the perfect lord ravager, and phainon’s been through 33550336 loops (girl help him wtf) by now. in each loop, he has to watch everyone die over and over again, and phainon, obvi, cannot remember anything. each loop, he’s a complete blank slate, ready to be traumatised over and over again. lygus keeps track of each loop, and keeps refining the data he puts in at the start of each timeloop to remove the ‘imperfections’ from the previous loop that were corrupting his experiments. 

ok anyways this is not about this shit we’re here to talk about why amphoreus is a neural network.

all of us here hate ai so i’m pretty sure you know the basic strokes of how it works, but if you don’t, then here’s a simple explanation: a neural network works based on input data. there’s many methods to training a machine, but the most generalised ones are the supervised vs the unsupervised models. how they work is what’s on the lid: supervised models mean that the input data is clearly labeled, and unsupervised models mean the input data is not labeled, which forces the ML algorithm to identify data on its own. based on what we know, i’m inclined to think that lygus is probably using a supervised model each time by removing outlier data and/or noise. 

wonderful, let’s talk about mydei now. y’all’ve probably seen a bunch of theories and leaks, but mydei’s highly likely to be a glitch in the system, or even worse, might be a virus that someone’s trying to use to break everyone out of this loop. between all of the theories i’ve seen, the one that connects mydei to the amphoreus loop is the theory that he’s a type of fileless malware. 

Tweet ref: https://x.com/tts_maruadelei/status/1932082549217751271

much like the other chrysos heirs, mydei doesn’t actually exist, but let me say: ain’t it interesting how mydei, the demigod of strife, who should have risen to be a titan that governed disputes, is the one who caused glitches in lygus’ system during the forgotten years?

let’s go back to the theory for a second: fileless attacks, simplified, operate based off of memory alone, which makes it much, much harder to detect compared to normal malware and viruses in a computer system. these fileless attacks can manifest in multiple ways, and one of those ways is a Distributed Denial of Service attack, aka, the infamous DDoS attack. DDoS attacks are among the most common cyberattacks of the modern century, and involve ‘botting’, where multiple bots attack one system to overwhelm the system with a high volume of requests.

the idea of ‘overwhelming’ a system can come in the form of exhausting resources like bandwidth, the Central Processing Unit (CPU) and, most importantly, the Random Access Memory (RAM). you know, the RAM being where most fileless malware operates out of. i’m sure you see where i’m going with this. 

for more psychic damage, there’s a type of attack called a ‘buffer overrun’ or ‘buffer overflow’. wikipedia defines data buffers as regions of memory that store data temporarily while it’s being moved from one place to another. a ‘buffer overflow’ is a type of DDoS (SIGHS) attack in which data in the buffer exceeds the storage capacity and flows into the following memory location, and corrupts the data in the secondary memory locations, and are the most common DDoS attack styles. sound familiar? 

bringing allllll of this back to amphoreus, i wouldn’t be too surprised if mydei’s older versions gained sentience, and started botting lygus’ AI/neural network and caused a DDoS attack, which caused his saves to be completely wiped due to a buffer overflow. thank u for listening can 3.4 hurry Up.

[bardic-poet]

UPDATE! it’s a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack not hacking! people’s passwords and stuff should be fine!

[yukiwhitetm]

AO3 is currently under a DDoS attack (Distributed Denial-of-Service attack: a group of hackers is trying to overwhelm the website with superfluous commands, taking it down temporarily or even indefinitely - it's akin to a group of people blocking the doorway to a shop and stopping legitimate customers from entering). The voluntary techs at AO3 are working hard to resolve the problem. So, don't panic, AO3 is here to stay. There is nothing you currently need to do on your end but be patient with them. I hope this helps!

[mariacallous]

A trove of Russian military and financial documents has been destroyed in a series of cyberattacks carried out by Ukrainian military intelligence, the Kyiv Post has reported.

The cyberattacks took place from Monday to Thursday, according to the news outlet, which cited sources from Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR). Over 800 Russian servers were reportedly affected, leading to the loss of military, administrative and financial documents. Mobile internet banking services with two Russian banks, the Moscow Credit Bank and Rosselkhozbank, were also reportedly interrupted as a result of the attacks. An unnamed Ukrainian military intelligence source cited by the Kyiv Post said: “The loss of data and documentation has led to a partial or complete halt in the operations of service providers and consumers across various sectors.” “It will require significant resources to search for and recover lost data, further demonstrating to the local population the poor technical infrastructure of the Russian Federation,” the source added. The reported data breaches are the latest in a series of coordinated cyberattacks by Ukrainian military intelligence specialists as part of the war against Russia. Several distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in July resulted in severe disruptions to services affecting Russia’s central bank and social media networks.

[anqelbean]

Reminder: this is not AO3 being down for server maintenance. This is a DDoS attack from a hate group name Anonymous Sudan. Their intentions were to make the site unavailable for its users because the "site is full of disgusting smuts and other LGBTQ and NSFW stuff" (their words).

Please do not try to open AO3, it is still under attack, do not go there until @/AO3_Status (on Twitter) or @ao3org (on Tumblr) says it's safe. It makes their job harder. Remember, these people are doing it for FREE.

For those that don't know what a DDoS attack is:

DDoS Attack or Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack is a cybercrime in which the attacker floods a server with internet traffic to prevent users from accessing connected online services and sites. (Source)

Flooding it with even more traffic makes the attack worse. Please be patient with the OTW. They are working very hard and Anonymous Sudan have stated they will attack continuously for up to 24 hours. Perhaps more.

These people are in no way affiliated with actual Anonymous from what I know.

Islamophobia is also not to be tolerated. These people are bigots because they're bigots, not because of their faith. Please call out any form of it you see.

IMPORTANT EDIT: The group is most likely Russian NOT Sudanese.

[kkachis]

quick fact check for anyone who needs it right now:

a DDoS attack does not steal the data from a website. DDoS stands for distributed denial of service and basically means that they're spamming the archiveofourown.org website with internet traffic, making it so that normal requests and normal site functioning can't go through. this is different than a data breach. it's like the difference between having huge crowds on a black friday sale versus someone breaking in through the back to steal from the store.

the whole "anonymous sudan" thing is also almost certainly not actually sudanese, and is most likely people pretending to be sudanese (and muslim) to disguise their real identity

[macmanx]

Aggressive AI crawlers increasingly overload community-maintained infrastructure, causing what amounts to persistent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on vital public resources. According to a comprehensive recent report from LibreNews, some open source projects now see as much as 97% of their traffic originating from AI companies' bots, dramatically increasing bandwidth costs, service instability, and burdening already stretched-thin maintainers.