Forum Technical Update, January 2024

[KML]

Happy new years everyone and greeting from Konrad, Siri's son,

In December, 2023 Warsailors.com, which usually gets one or a few GB of traffic per month, suddenly got over 100GB of traffic from a small number of locations via some Amazon AWS servers almost all targetting the forum. It is unclear if they were trying to hack the forum, carry out a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack to shut down the forum, or it was merely a bot gone wild (less likely). The result was that by the end of December, we were using the full capacity of the server to load the forum and some of you may have noticed that the forum was periodically showing error messages.

I have reinstalled the forum, updated to the newest version of PhpBB, and blocked a large range of IP addresses coming out of Amazon's headquarters (let Siri know if any of you in WA state find that you are blocked in one location but not via your phone, etc.)

Hopefully everything should be running smoothly again. There is a possibility that the attacker (if it was intentional) will notice they were massively blocked and then choose to redirect their attack from some other direction, but I'll keep an eye out on the web logs for the next few weeks and see if I can spot this more quickly. If this becomes a periodic problem, I'll look into things such as CloudFlare and like services to see if we can protect against that in future.

Best,

KML and Siri (in retirement but still active here!)

[mjbollinger]

Thanks. We really appreciate all that you do to keep the forum going. Well done!

[Darius]

Thank you. Wish you no such problems in 2024

Regards

Darius