Losing a round to the spammers and attackers

Sorry, but I’m a bit disgusted today. I know that attacks are part of the internet, but that doesn’t help when you are on the receiving end.

Over the past couple of weeks our forum site has been under attack. Our forum site uses phpBB, and and old version of phpBB (which we did not use) had a remote vulnerability a year or so ago. For some reason, attackers are trying to exploit that vulnerability on our forum site even though we are patched and should be safe.

“But wait, why are you worried if you are not vulnerable to the the attack?”, you ask. These attacks are consuming our allocated bandwidth. Being a small project operating pretty much without any funds we have limits to our bandwidth on our sites. In the process of trying to crack our system the attackers are downloading the same page hundreds of thousands of times, consuming nearly all the bandwidth we have.

Because of this, we’ve had no other option than to disable the forum site. While it may serve a useful function to our users, if we leave it up, the gramps-project.org domain will exceed its bandwidth allocation and all users will be locked out of the entire domain.

These guys are relentless. Even though we have disabled the forum, they continue to pound our site with requests to the now missing pages.

Disgusting low-lifes.

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