So if the forum seems a little sluggish at the moment, it's because there has been a DDoS attack going on since yesterday evening. Currently, somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 computers are hitting fiero.nl with traffic. My firewall is keeping up so in all honestly, it's hardly more than a nuisance at the moment but I'm constantly monitoring the situation.

BTW, this is also why you see this:

What would happen if someone like really famous gave us a shoutout and we got hit with like 100,000 legitimate users trying to connect to fiero.nl

Is it something malicious about the bots that are sending traffic or just the sheer amount of traffic causing the problems

[This message has been edited by Doggo (edited 04-03-2025).]

quote Originally posted by Doggo: What would happen if someone like really famous gave us a shoutout and we got hit with like 100,000 legitimate users trying to connect to fiero.nl

The server would not be able to handle that. In fact, most servers would not be able to handle that.

quote Is it something malicious about the bots that are sending traffic or just the sheer amount of traffic causing the problems

Amount of traffic.

quote Originally posted by Cliff Pennock: Currently, somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 computers are hitting fiero.nl with traffic.

Cliff, any chance that's connected to This?

quote Originally posted by Patrick: Cliff, any chance that's connected to This?

Sorry for being dense here, but I don't see why that would be the cause for a DDoS attack?

I honestly have no idea why fiero.nl was targeted. It looked like one of those typical, off-the-shelf DDoS attacks you can buy on the dark web for fifty bucks. The goal was to overwhelm the server by bombarding it with massive amounts of page requests.

Fortunately, almost the entire forum is cached in RAM, so the server barely broke a sweat handling the load. Plus, most of the requests were coming from countries where it’s highly unlikely anyone’s actually interested in Fieros. I mean, how many Fieros could there possibly be in Uzbekistan or Honduras? Sure, maybe there are a few in China or even Albania, but let’s be honest - most of that traffic probably wasn’t legit.

So in the end, it wasn’t too hard to block traffic from those regions, and while the attack was annoying, it was mostly just a nuisance.

quote Originally posted by Cliff Pennock: Sorry for being dense here, but I don't see why that would be the cause for a DDoS attack?

I thought it might be possible that this mention of a Fiero in a highly circulated RockAuto blurb could've led to an extra 20,000 or so hits on a Fiero website. Or maybe not.

quote Originally posted by Patrick: I thought it might be possible that this mention of a Fiero in a highly circulated RockAuto blurb could've led to an extra 20,000 or so hits on a Fiero website. Or maybe not.

Ah ok! 😊

No, this wasn't legitimate traffic. I could tell by the pages targeted and the countries this traffic came from.

What is the purpose of these attacks?

quote Originally posted by pokeyfiero: What is the purpose of these attacks?

I wish I knew...

Maybe I was a random target by someone testing out a bot net. Maybe it's someone who's pissed at me, the forum or someone else on the forum. Your guess is as good as mine.