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Mastodon says its flagship server was hit by a DDoS attack (techcrunch.com)

submitted 4 months ago by nemeski@piefed.social to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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[-] jafra@slrpnk.net 35 points 4 months ago

How long will it take for them to learn the fediverse is resilient?

[-] Gullible@sh.itjust.works 19 points 4 months ago

For all we know, they achieved their goal, irrespective of .social’s uptime.

[-] jafra@slrpnk.net 6 points 4 months ago

Do ddos open up the server? My naive understanding is it only hinders its reachability?

[-] Gullible@sh.itjust.works 6 points 4 months ago

They can, but usually don’t. I’ve heard of systems being vulnerable to attack when resource usage is completely maximized. They can definitely cover up an intrusion or test a botnet, though, and I suspect this was a botnet test. Mastodon users overwhelmingly strike me as not worth unmasking. (And that’s a good thing)

[-] scytale@piefed.zip 12 points 4 months ago

Depends on their goal. They still inconvenienced a significant amount of people on Mastodon, especially since the flagship instance has a lot of users. Of course if this causes users to spread out to other instances, then I guess that's a net good thing and can be attributed to fediverse resiliency.

[-] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 6 points 4 months ago

Who do you mean with them?

[-] Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 4 months ago

The DDoS perpetrators

[-] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 11 points 4 months ago

Well they targeted the biggest instance. Their attack didn't stop mastodon as a whole, but many users were impacted

[-] jafra@slrpnk.net 2 points 4 months ago

Maybe it was about silencing s/o on this instance for some time. Idk.

[-] FreeBooteR69@lemmy.ca 3 points 4 months ago

Sure but it is ultimately futile because Mastodon, using the ActivityPub protocol, aka The Fediverse, can't be completely shut down. Somebody ddos's one instance, well there are other instances you can join to easily defeat the ddos.

[-] daychilde@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago

You make a good point, however a counterpoint: Instance information is not hidden. It would be relatively trivial for a bad actor with resources to DDOS one instance to add other instances.