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and More!
At the beginning of this week we were hit with a DDOS attack. Once we figured out what the issue was we turned on our Cloudflare firewall and the site was back up and running. However, what we didn't account for was Cloudflare batching IP addresses. Essentially, every user was being filtered through Cloudflare in order to cut out the spambots that were hitting the site. In doing so, each unique IP address was being batched into a Cloudflare IP address before hitting TNA. This means that if one person in that batch incorrectly put in their password and locked themselves out then as far as TNA knows everyone else sharing the same Cloudflare IP address was the same user, thus, each different user trying to login would receive the "you've used up your password attempts" message, and in fact would be restarting the 15 minute clock for themselves and everyone else in that batch. So, the good news is that no one was trying to hack any accounts during this particular issue. We've put a solution in place, but it is untested so if you experience continued issues please email me at [email protected].
A DDOS attack happens when some dipshit who has nothing better to do with his time and money decides they want to make themselves feel better by being an annoyance to everyone who uses a particular website (and yes I'm being sexist here, because I don't think there's a woman alive who is this stupid). So, they pay a person or company (usually Russian or Ukrainian - in this case the attack was Russian) who has the means to invoke this kind of attack. Basically it just sends tens of thousands of fake users (spambots) to access a particular domain (TNABoard.com). In doing so the server's resources get used up as it can't handle the load and the real users of the site experience what you may have earlier in the week - slow load times, pages sometimes working sometimes not, or just flat out being unable to get to the site. While it can be inexpensive to implement it's not free, and in this day and age it's particularly easy to thwart... so why someone bothers is beyond me - other than to just be a juvenile idiot.
