Forum / Site issues / Downtime

[AUbicycles]

BNA is being hit currently by something which is having the effect of a Denial of Service (DOS) attack and brute force attacks.

sorry.. but it is nasty and overloading the server. not much to be done.

[HappyHumber]

This might explain the funny little screen telling me BNA was scanning my browser, and some mention of DDOS when I loaded up just now. First time I'd ever seen that.

[AUbicycles]

Yes, this 5 second screen is a last resort to keep some access for genuine members and visitors.

[AUbicycles]

Unfortunately the attack is ongoing - if I stop this annoying protection barrier, the server gets hammered.
There are a few different attacks going on an it unfortunately appears to be a case of sitting it out.

[gabrielle260]

So, Christopher, is that why I can't access the forum through Tapatalk?
Sorry - should also say that I understand you are doing what you must.... keep at it!
Andrew

[AUbicycles]

Andrew, yes I just tested tapatalk and it is being blocked because of these increased (temporary) security measures.

[Thoglette]

Unfortunately the attack is ongoing.

Good luck!

[HappyHumber]

I can live with that 'protection barrier' for however long it takes.

Good luck, Christopher.

[foo on patrol]

Mongrels with nothing better to do with their time!

Foo

[Shred11]

Maybe the Boullie Tacker has learned some mad haxor skilz!

[AUbicycles]

Don't know who that it, but something tells me that you have a a few skilz of your own

I will take another peak and see if it is still going. Currently most of it will be bouncing off. A few people have asked why target BNA... these appear to be automated and looking for vulnerabilities i.e. brute force - as opposed to being pinpointed for other reasons. As a friendly and positive website site and community, BNA is not very offensive!

[PiratePete]

So, Christopher, is that why I can't access the forum through Tapatalk?
Sorry - should also say that I understand you are doing what you must.... keep at it!
Andrew

Our forum ( cyclogps.com ) has had issues which seems to have started after the Tapatalk update released on Wednesday. The site admin updated the plugin for Tapatalk (as requested yesterday) and this caused big issues so he had currently disabled tapatalk to try and work around the issues. I'm only a modoerator there, so no expert but our site is now quite lathargic and I suspect the DOS is from that direction.

[AUbicycles]

Thanks for the input. While tapatalk seems to get worse with time, it is not a tapatalk issue and not recently updated.

[ldrcycles]

I had been wondering if it was just a precaution or in response to something. The protection screen is a small price to pay.

[rodneycc]

Tapatalk working now. Cheers

[GTPilot]

There is an extortion racket going around ATM, They are demanding 25 bitcoins payment or they will DDOS you with 500-600Gbps UDP payload. these guys though are targeting companies with large web presence, especially e-commerce..

[AUbicycles]

Everything is back to normal, after employing the doorman, the trouble eventually moved on.

One thing that doesn't help is the number of bots and scrapers, if you get a couple coming then it really turns up the heat, along with malicious brute force attacks.

[warthog1]

One thing that doesn't help is the number of bots and scrapers

Had to google that. I'm not much the wiser really.

[AUbicycles]

Bots are little automated programs that visit websites, they can have many different purposes, for example the GoogleBot goes through to record everything for their search - looking for new and changed content, plus confirming that old content is still there.

Scrapers intend to copy the entire content, many are malicious such as searching for private data such as emails to use to spam, or to create 'fake' duplicate websites or to analysis for other purposes such a (un)law enforcement agencies or by commerce. One example of a good bot is the one for the waybackmachine which is an internet archive of all online data.

[warthog1]

Thanks Christopher.

[thelittlebattler]

Just got an automatic page load up with "website server down" or something similar. Had linked icons showing the problem:

my computer (tick)--> "cloudshare" (tick) --> bicycles.net.au (cross) server problem

Is that normal or something else having a crack again?

[AUbicycles]

Normally when there is an overload. Usually temporary and usually means multiple bots are accessing the site at the same time putting on a high server load.