Published 17 November 2024 at 22.19
Domestic. Fria Tider was down again on Sunday due to issues with a massive DDoS attack, which was initially resolved but then escalated to overload the paper's own Internet connection, leading to a laggy website.
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For unknown reasons, someone has directed large overload attacks against Fria Tider at various times during the week and a larger attack on Sunday, which was successfully and caused the site to go down temporarily in the morning.
The calls were successfully blocked by Fria Tider initially and the site was back up by lunchtime. Shortly afterwards, however, the attack intensified, burdening parts of the IP network in the data hall where Fria Tider's server is located.
One problem was that Linux's built-in firewall netfilter was unable to effectively block the amount of IP addresses that were included in the attack.
Fria Tider has now analyzed the attack and blocked most of the IP addresses in the entire sjok, which proved to be more effective.
The attack is ongoing still but currently not interfering with the site. The attack is thus averted with the newspaper's own resources for this time, but if there are larger attacks in the future, Fria Tider may have to hire a distributed solution, as several readers have suggested. However, it entails other risks, for politically motivated suspensions and other things, which is why Fria Tider prefers to avoid it.