A user of afraid.org had a domain that around 7:30 AM PST came under attack, with many gigabits of malicious traffic at its peak directed to all afraid.org DNS servers. The attack is still in progress at the time of this writing, but has been reduced significantly.
While attacks are not that unusual for afraid.org, they are generally not this large as today.
Unfortunately - this exhausted every ounce of resource available for afraid.org, and caused serious disruption for the site afraid.org, and for innocent bystanders sites that are also using afraid.org for their own sites.
So, after today's eventful morning, I will be taking further measures to protect users by increasing the available nameserver pool size from 4, to at minimum 64, and begin allocating configurations to members in a way that minimizes overlapping configurations as much as possible.
Over time I have observed that much of the human based problematic events such as this one comes from (a relatively small set of) unpaid members, it is a sad truth. I will not stop providing the free portion of the service, but I am strongly leaning toward moving paid members to their own tier of servers.
While afraid.org has not had a problem of this kind in a while, I'm going to reflect on this event and take measures to make the site better because of it.
Comments
http://coreduo.me.uk/index.php?id=356
2010-07-16 09:11:42
freedns.afraid.org is currently experiencing unexpected levels of traffic this AM
That's all that was in their news post
EDIT: OH COME ON. I think they just went down again.
EDIT 2: Up again. ffs.