Source URL: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/07/06/1737253/the-fsf-faces-active-ongoing-and-increasing-ddos-attacks?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed
Source: Slashdot
Title: The FSF Faces Active ‘Ongoing and Increasing’ DDoS Attacks
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AI Summary and Description: Yes
**Summary:** The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is grappling with ongoing Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, primarily attributed to botnets and potential Large Language Model (LLM) scrapers. Despite these challenges, their critical infrastructure remains operational thanks to dedicated technical staff.
**Detailed Description:**
The message from Ian Kelling highlights the escalating security challenges faced by the Free Software Foundation as they contend with persistent DDoS attacks. The key points of the situation include:
– **Attack Overview:**
– FSF services, including gnu.org, ftp.gnu.org, and savannah.gnu.org, are under sustained DDoS attacks that have been ongoing since August 2024.
– Noteworthy sources of these attacks include large botnets and LLM web crawlers.
– **Mitigation Efforts:**
– Despite the severity of the attacks, the websites have maintained normal response times due to the proactive measures taken by a small team of system administrators.
– The team has implemented mitigation strategies to counteract several high-severity attacks, showcasing their effective defense mechanisms.
– **Nature of Attacks:**
– There is speculation that the attacks aim to take down their sites and could be an effort to build datasets for LLM training.
– The specific identity or intent behind the attacks remains unclear.
– **Botnet Involvement:**
– A particularly large botnet was reported to be controlling around five million IPs, actively targeting FSF services since January.
– Attacks appear to be evolving, with multiple iterations causing intermittent downtime for the sites.
– **Challenges Faced:**
– The organization is currently limited in tech staffing, with only two full-time system administrators handling these immense security threats.
– There’s an appeal for community support through membership purchases to bolster their technical resources.
– **Broader Web Health:**
– Kelling notes that FSF is not alone in facing these challenges and suggests that the overall health of the web is deteriorating due to the prevalence of various types of crawlers and potential abuse.
This situation emphasizes the importance of robust security measures, especially for organizations in open-source software and communal development spaces facing targeted cyber threats. Understanding the nature of these attacks and the strategies deployed to safeguard against them is crucial for professionals in the fields of security, infrastructure, and compliance.