Month: October 2014

According to a Forum Post on So Furry: It was just a server issue, which is fixed right now. WE can only guess that it might had to do with what is going on with the Fur Affinity DDOS attack.

Speaking of which Fur Affinity is Back. According to an Official Post

The site is currently in Read Only mode, but we’re posting an update as to the Who/What/Where/Why/When

The DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack started sometime Tuesday night at around 10PM. We’re not sure the exact time, we just know that when it hit things hit hard. The site was offline within roughly a minute. After contacting our host, they quickly confirmed that they were seeing massive incoming bandwidth and had to blackhole our IP (blackhole essentially isolates FA from the rest of their network).

What’s a DDOS? A massive network of computer systems flooding a target’s with so much bandwidth and data that it knocks it offline. It’s like driving down an empty highway and having 100,000 cars appear, causing instant gridlock.

We DO NOT KNOW who was behind the DDOS, nor do we have any speculation. We’re not looking to point fingers. Our host is looking into the details and will be taking legal action if at all possible as this impacted many of their customers.

The DDOS persisted and caused massive lag spikes and connectivity problems for our host and spread through over four facilities. Emergency maintenance had to be done for router upgrades. Unfortunately, that didn’t fix the problem and the attackers DDOSed the site and services again. Some of you may have noticed FA popping in and out at times.

The last 24 hours have been very hectic among site staff. Waiting on responses from our host (which were slow and far between). We still do not know the extent of the full DDOS as our host has not given us the full run down, but it was more than enough to saturate a 10 Gigabit fiber link.

We had to wait for the DDOS attacks to subside and for our host to update their firewalls and prepare for further attacks. The DDOS attack was out of our control, and we’re taking some steps and measures to prevent it from happening in the future. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to stop a DDOS, but there are steps that can be taken to mitigate the damages done by them. SoFurry, Weasyl and Inkbunny were also hit with similar attacks. We’d also like to assure all users NO USER DATA was lost or compromised during the attack.

We are currently looking at migrating our hosts to a new system (we’re still researching where) and are raising donations to do so. We’re looking into a distributed cloud or dedicated server based hosting (we’re still looking into the finer details). If you’d like to donate you may do so here:
http://www.gofundme.com/ftrtc8

We will be donating 10% of the donations to SoFurry since they’ve suffered outages and attacks almost on par with FA. As a community, we feel it’s our job to try to look out for one another.

We know there are many questions, concerns and more, and we will be working on addressing those in the next few days. For now, we’re just happy to have FA back and will be focusing on clean up from the attacks.

In an official statement post on So Furry

Recent update – DOS attack yesterday

Credited to: Toumal

Heya folks! Sorry for the downtime yesterday.

We were under attack, and the problem is that while we have a firewall that can fend of such things, it’s not a simple matter of just rejecting bad traffic. The thing is, datacenter routers tend to react to traffic that isn’t accepted by sending a broadcast saying “hey, we got some packets here, anyone know where that server has gone off to?”. Multiply that with a couple million every second and you get the situation. As a result, datacenter operators typically “nullroute” servers that are under attack as soon as they start rejecting traffic.

There’s ways around that, and we actually used a solution back in February/March when we had a 6MBit/s DDOS hitting sofurry. It worked beautifully and the attacker gave up after two weeks, but it costs a pretty penny and basically doubles our operating cost. That’s why we don’t do this unless we’re under prolonged attack.

Also, no we can’t use Cloudflare. But thanks for suggesting it 🙂

Anyway, we’re no longer nullrouted and hopefully this is the end of that. If not, well, lets see what happens. The attackers weren’t very smart and there may be consequences coming up.

Thanks for your support here, and on Twitter while the site was down. Believe it or not, that’s incredibly motivating. Thank you ❤

UPDATE:

As of the AM of the 17th they are down once again

According to Fur Affinity’s own Twitter page, they are down due to a DDOS or a denial of service attack. Which continues as of this posting, they do say they will try and be up as soon as possible but they can’t say when that will be.