Forums under botnet "attack"
Posted: June 9th, 2025, 4:02 amFor past couple of days at least, a similar situation happened to tens of thousands of (not only) different phpBB forums throughout the world - a stupid botnets made the site practically unusable. This is most likely not an intended DoS attack, but just some stupid morons crawling gazillions of addresses which include SIDs, treating them as uniqe websites. This is partially because of the phpBB actually has such a thing as putting made-up SIDs into an address string in the first place.
Took some time to find out the root of the problem, not being a website developer (well not in PHP at least) but for now, it is mitigated at least to a certain degree, using at least half of the solution from Thomas Linder Puls of phpBB forums. Gonna have a look on the rest (disabling the bloody append-SID feature in the first place) later as it creates some problems and the forums is not working at all with that code of his.
Using blackhole or 8G firewall did not help as it is not malicious traffic per se, it is just dumb code using another dumb code in phpBB.
I cannot promise everything is solved now, also there may be some downtimes when I'm working on the problem. So try a few times, if the problem persists, contact me via PM or e-mail or something. End of report.
Took some time to find out the root of the problem, not being a website developer (well not in PHP at least) but for now, it is mitigated at least to a certain degree, using at least half of the solution from Thomas Linder Puls of phpBB forums. Gonna have a look on the rest (disabling the bloody append-SID feature in the first place) later as it creates some problems and the forums is not working at all with that code of his.
Using blackhole or 8G firewall did not help as it is not malicious traffic per se, it is just dumb code using another dumb code in phpBB.
I cannot promise everything is solved now, also there may be some downtimes when I'm working on the problem. So try a few times, if the problem persists, contact me via PM or e-mail or something. End of report.