For the last few weeks I’ve been unable access this forum or the website - domain not available.
Was something wrong at your end? Glad to see you back.
Site down for a few weeks?
Re: Site down for a few weeks?
CopyrightAid (the site admin) can tell you more details, but I understand it was a sort of DDOS attack.
Advice or comment provided here is not and does not purport to be legal advice as defined by s.12 of Legal Services Act 2007
Re: Site down for a few weeks?
Any number of suspects then I bet! Shows you’re doing a good job.
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CopyrightAid
- Site Admin
- Posts: 289
- Joined: Wed Jan 03, 2007 1:48 pm
Re: Site down for a few weeks?
Yes. We are under a constant ongoing DDoS attack. I am not sure who we have upset, but as Andy knows, we have been under attack on and off for a long, long time.
This year things have got very bad and it has been hard to mitigate as most offending traffic now comes from multiple cloud computing platforms - which each have many 1000's of IP addresses. It is hard to do simple blocking as one single IP may only be making a request a few times a hour, but the same thing repeated across many 1000's of IPs brings my little server to a grinding halt.
Without blocking, if I look at the log files, as soon as I connect up the website, there are hundreds of requests pouring in every second and the server locks up.
I now have code in place now that does some extra analysis of what each IP is actually doing across multiple requests and blocks access to any IP that looks suspicious for a number of days (longer for repeat offenders).
Unfortunately it does sound like this has affected some legitimate users such as yourself. I am still fine tuning stuff, so sorry if you have been affected.
A side affect will be that legitimate users coming via the malicious IP will get blocked as well, but the alternative is closing the site, so trying to make the best of a bad situation. My hope is that with regular blocking and continuing to report offending services that the malicious actors will be removed of loose interest and move on.
This year things have got very bad and it has been hard to mitigate as most offending traffic now comes from multiple cloud computing platforms - which each have many 1000's of IP addresses. It is hard to do simple blocking as one single IP may only be making a request a few times a hour, but the same thing repeated across many 1000's of IPs brings my little server to a grinding halt.
Without blocking, if I look at the log files, as soon as I connect up the website, there are hundreds of requests pouring in every second and the server locks up.
I now have code in place now that does some extra analysis of what each IP is actually doing across multiple requests and blocks access to any IP that looks suspicious for a number of days (longer for repeat offenders).
Unfortunately it does sound like this has affected some legitimate users such as yourself. I am still fine tuning stuff, so sorry if you have been affected.
A side affect will be that legitimate users coming via the malicious IP will get blocked as well, but the alternative is closing the site, so trying to make the best of a bad situation. My hope is that with regular blocking and continuing to report offending services that the malicious actors will be removed of loose interest and move on.
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CopyrightAid
- Site Admin
- Posts: 289
- Joined: Wed Jan 03, 2007 1:48 pm
Re: Site down for a few weeks?
I have been doing some further work as it does seem like we were blocking some legitimate traffic. Thanks for the feedback Les 
Thankfully the random requests seem to have slowed, though there are still around 4500 IPs blocked by our firewall - these will tend to be repeat offenders and any false positives should timeout over the next few days.
Hopefully things will be on a better footing moving forward, although I note that we are back to 50 fake sign ups a day again. So still work to do.
Thankfully the random requests seem to have slowed, though there are still around 4500 IPs blocked by our firewall - these will tend to be repeat offenders and any false positives should timeout over the next few days.
Hopefully things will be on a better footing moving forward, although I note that we are back to 50 fake sign ups a day again. So still work to do.