Gixen under DDOS attack

mario · Site Admin Joined: 03 Oct 2006 Posts: 7275

A quick notice to users - since yesterday Gixen has been under a massive DDOS attack. This has affected this forum only so far, as the backend is fairly well isolated. No snipes failed due to this.

To give you an idea of large this is - so far more than 137,000 IP addresses from all around the world has been blocked, and this number is still growing.

I have no idea what the motivation for this is, so far.

Please be patient if you require assistance, as this issue is occupying a lot of my time at the moment.

Ramona · Guest

At least one other forum which I access is seeing the same thing (hundreds of thousands of accesses, when there are normally at most a few hundred users connected). That forum has implemented a CloudFlare \"Click here to prove you're a human\" screen.

One theory is that these are bot which are scraping forums in order to train AI models.

Another is that they are training runs by bad actors who are gearing up to attack higher impact sites in the future.

mario · Site Admin Joined: 03 Oct 2006 Posts: 7275

I didn't need cloudflare to resolve this issue. Their pricing model is such that one doesn't even know what he'll end up paying in the end.

Gixen was from the beginning made very lean, and I avoided relying on any proprietary technology for two reasons: to keep the flexibility in the future choices, and to keep the cost down.

The reason why I used plain C (not C++ that tends to explode in size and complexity while performance goes down) for the backend is to keep everything running very fast, and on minimal hardware.

That's really the reason why Gixen is 1/10 of the price you'll pay at the competitor sites - it's mostly one guy doing everything on my own (with some occassional help for things I am not that good at, and there are some), and above mentioned choices that keep the hosting costs low.