Forum slowdown due to spam attack

[Jacques (VSO)]

Forum is currently under attack by spam bots. This has caused slowdown or access errors.

We are working to resolve the situation.

[Cougar_II]

Forum is currently under attack by spam bots. This has caused slowdown or access errors.

We are working to resolve the situation.

This is why I am getting all those Error 502 Gateway Error.
I was just going to report this...

Myself and a few others clean out the SPAM too as soon as we see it, and BAN users that posts 100% SPAM.

[Jacques (VSO)]

Information on the attack.
it was a probable rogue scraper / web crawler agent using ~ 200 different IP located in Singapore to scrap everything they can find on the forum.

They collect whatever they can find, including email addresses, personal information etc to build large database of public information and/or to feed some AI with learning data.

the server dedicated to the forum is not a very powerful one, therefore the big number of request generated by rogue scraper managed to saturate the server capacity, leading to severe slowdown as well as some 502 gateway error.

Very drastic mesure has been taken to limit the number of request per second, to detect rogue web crawler that ignore robots.txt, and automatically ban perpetrator IP.

Side note: The loss of attachments is not related to this attack but was caused by wrong manipulation of backups.