Had to shut down Guest access

[Whiskerfish]

We had a huge bot/guest hit over the last few hours. At one point we had over 3,000 "Guests" logged onto the site draining all our server resources. They seemed to be from Singapore, California, and China. It took me over an hour just to gain access to our Administration panel to restrict them.

Turns out it is one company operating from many servers. Alibaba cloud is the culprit. We are playing whack a mole with IP's so it may take a while to get this under control

So for the time being I have shut down "Guest" access. To see any of the Forums you will need to log in. Sorry for the inconvenience.

WF

[Whiskerfish]

Most users ever online was 3407 on Sun May 04, 2025 6:00 am

Currently

In total there are 43 users online :: 2 registered, 0 hidden and 41 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)

After numerous attempts I found a htaccess file with all the right ju ju to kill off the China bots for a while. This Ai stuff is making stuff challenging. We are now using a file from Wizcrafts.net I tried about 30 different ones before I found this and it seems to work pretty good. Dropped us from 3,000 plus guests to less than 50 in just a few minutes.

I will monitor for a while but may be able open things back up to guests in a couple days

As with anything else when you change a root directory file it may have impacts elsewhere on the site. If you notice anything funky let me know please

Sorry for the hassle

WF

[Fred Camper]

thank you for your detective activity and stellar arrest of bot guests. That was quite an attack of 3000 plus and I can amagine how hard it was to log in and go after them. Great job.

[Rat]

Time for another big raise …

Gord

[ritalz]

Admittedly I know very very little about how this software works but it sounds like the security needs to tighten up. Don't even understand why the bots would attack a site like this. Anyway, thank you for your hard work and vigilance.

[Whiskerfish]

Most of these occurrences are not really an attack per se. They are a extreme overkill data collection. The site it originated from (Aliababa) is a huge software and cloud company out of China. I do not know how their targets are selected but at least 3 different servers in 3 Countries focused on our little site at the same time. It overwhelmed our Server to the point that were were basically shut down for about 5 or 6 hours that I saw. I did not try to log on until about 9 this morning and that is when I found out there was an issue. It may have been most of the night that I was not aware of. It probably would have corrected itself once they ran out of stuff to download but there is no way of telling when that may have happened. According to the PHPBB Board we are not the only ones suffering there attention right now.

[redglbx]

Thanks for your skill & diligence Steve !

[NotSoLilCrippseys]

Thanks for the hard work on this issue.

I've had that "Oh, sh!^" experience with websites, and it just isn't fun.

I'm glad the PHPBB community seems to have offered some helpful insights.

The Internet is a wondrous thing - until it isn't.

[Oldewing]

Thanks once again Boss......

[Whiskerfish]

Looks like things are good so I have unlocked most of the popular forums for guests again. If anyone has anything specific let me know