Image by Eugene Kucher from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The site is under hostile attack
On Easter Saturday, inexplicably, traffic suddenly tripled, and kept growing day after day. Each time we did updates and tweaks to the settings the site was overwhelmed by even more traffic. So all kinds of error messages appeared as the server responses were exhausted. There were cascading failures for days as different parts of the system tried to recover. Despite the calm period now, the ferocious activity still hasn’t slowed down. Yesterday traffic was running at five times normal.
Given that the attack started just two weeks before the Australian election, and during the long Easter holiday weekend, it appeared timed to strike when tech help would be away, and thus cause the longest outages and largest disruption.
Strangely (despite our election), most of the new traffic was coming from overseas, especially from the USA and Singapore. Many requests were for the same two old posts from 2020 and 2010, seemingly randomly picked, showing this was not an organic thing at all.
In the end, this attack was both clumsy and sophisticated at the same time. Whoever was doing this must have had control of something like 50,000 bots in China, the USA, Brazil and Europe and the ability to access hundreds of thousands of IPs each week. Yet they didn’t even bother to request different random pages or recent pages, which might have made this look like an AI training program or new traffic. It’s like they wanted us to know they were targeting the site. It was hostile. I will be notifying the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC).
One particular Chinese server stood out for being a source of trouble, and after those requests were blocked, traffic from Singapore declined sharply. (Sincere apologies to any freedom loving Chinese readers affected by this.). Obviously we don’t know the true original source, it may be the CCP, but there are other candidates who might want us to think it was China while they cover their own tracks.
That said, people may not think of me as a China critic but I’ve written 134 posts on China, and few other people in Australia seem to point out that we still don’t have answers about the biggest industrial accident in history that killed millions. And we don’t have an apology for the Covid lies, the coal lies, the reckless experiments, or the strange freezers of frozen Ebola in California. Hardly anyone else seems to mention that the cheap postage from China is an archaic UN rort we all pay for (which destroys our small businesses). I like to remind everyone that the CCP is the only “developing nation” on Earth that can’t cut emissions, but can have a space program. And also that the coal-burning-communists pay activists in the UK and USA to tell us to use less coal while they use more. Many have congratulated Anthony Albanese for “restoring trade relations” with China, but I’m one of the few pointing out that all he did was surrender. (Shh, nobody mention why China launched that trade war@!). Anyhow, you get my point…
If you can help, the site needs more armor
The site web guru (the excellent Eric) has made many changes. The bigger servers will cost more, and there’s much more we need to do. I can’t really spell out the details for obvious reasons. But will report in a few weeks on progress.
Never surrender
Please, if you can, hit the tip jar, buy me a coffee, a steak, a month on the server ($200) and money to pay software updates. Australians may prefer to use direct deposit (details below) where you can also set up a monthly donation which helps me plan ahead. Thanks for your contribution, no matter how big or small. I know times are tough for some people.
Due to ridiculous legal froufrou, we can’t use the word “donate” so in Paypal people need to “buy me” a number of “units of emergency chocolate” — (1 unit equals $1) so write a number of dollars into the Quantity Field! (Apologies it’s not more user friendly. Lucky my readers are smart. 🙂 ). This works in AUD, CAD, EUR, GBP, NZD or USD.
OR send help directly via National Australia Bank for UnQwerty Pty Ltd BSB: 086420 Account number: 563148308 or via International transfer or even via snail-mail.
Thanks to the patient readers who have put up with so many disruptions to the site in the last week. And thanks to those who have already donated!
PS: Best wishes for Election Day today Canada!