Unable to access fb.net forums

[coderJeff]

fb.net is experiencing massive number of hits. Working on it.

[fxm]

This surprised me when we went from usually around 100 users online at most, to suddenly and recently 2000.

[coderJeff]

Server is at 100% usage trying to keep up with page requests, mostly for the forum's membership list. I have disabled the membership page for now.

Compared to earlier in the year, fb.net has 3000% more unique visitors recently. Starting around august started to grow exponentially.

[deltarho[1859]]

This sounds like a DOS attack but I doubt that cyber-criminals are involved otherwise they would have brought the site down in August with a demand for a bitcoin payment and there are better targets than peer support forums where the product is free.

Starting around august started to grow exponentially.

That is odd, could be a newbie attacker just learning their trade in which case they would not chance making a demand.

The number of users online has just gone up by about 150 in the last half an hour or so.

What a pain.

[fxm]

A few "HTTP error 503 Server too busy please try again later" this morning, and response time a little long often.

[jj2007]

For me, the forum was down the last 2 or 3 days. Now I get a 503 every now and then. Users browsing this forum: badidea, jj2007 and 35 guests looks almost normal. I've always wondered who these "guests" are - real persons or bots?

[badidea]

Is it possible to block guest access to the forum completely? (except login page). As temporary measure in case (or before) the server runs into problems again.

[fxm]

A few "HTTP error 503 Server too busy please try again later" this morning, and response time a little long often.

Always the same operating a little degraded.
Even about 800 guests as now, it's way too much compared to a few months ago.

[coderJeff]

There will probably be more outages getting this locked down. Sorry, I don't know how long it will take. Hopefully can keep the forum at least partially usable in the interim. It might be badly behaving crawler bot out of China, but has all the characteristics of a DDoS attack. Well behaved legit crawler bots should show up by name in the list of guests.

[dodicat]

It is automatically going from about 400 to 490 guests the re-starting at 400.(at the moment)
Does a single guest mean a single login?
Maybe by one machine is doing this?
Does somebody have a grudge and has set up an old computer with a few lines of code to do this.
Or are these guests all different?

[Lost Zergling]

A funny solution could be a check box surrounded by a blue round "I'm a robot" with an "Ok" button that works only if the box is checked, coupled with a link "I am a robot and I ask the blacklisting of my url "and another link" access to the forum ". The blacklist url would then be redirected to a page called "this workstation is probably used by a hacker for a DDoS attack and we keep the logs at your disposal if you want to exploit them legally, please email xxx @ xxx to unsubscribe of this service "

[jj2007]

Users browsing this forum: jj2007 and 28 guests

[fxm]

Who is online:

Users browsing this forum (Community Discussion): fxm and 29 guests

In total there are 469 users online :: 4 registered, 0 hidden and 465 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)

[D.J.Peters]

Who is online

In total there are 609 users online :: 5 registered, 1 hidden and 603 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 2148 on Sun Oct 27, 2019 11:07 am

[Imortis]

Out of curiosity, I checked, and it looks like there is a known exploit in PHPBB and the memberlist.php page. I wonder if that is why that page was getting hammered?