St. GNU's Trials and Tribulations

The server is back offline after a strategic and coordinated DDoS attack, this time with more sophistication.

We had upgraded to the full-scale DDoS protection plan provided by Cloudflare, in addition to StGNU configuring his own set of anti-DDoS mechanisms however the attackers used social engineering to play on his "good guy" side in order to get the IP address.

Essentially this is what happened.

1. New server was setup with the top-tier Cloudflare plan in addition to specific anti-DDoS configurations done by StGNU.

2. Sometimes the DNS changes can take 12-24+ hours to propagate with Cloudflare, StGNU was helping miners who couldn't connect because Cloudflare changes hadn't propagated by giving them the server IP address to use for the time being.

3. Attackers used social engineering to get the new direct IP address, thus subverting the entire protection that Cloudflare provides and proceeded to DDoS us again.

4. Case closed, no more Mr. Nice GNU. If you can't connect you will just have to wait several hours, no more giving out the server IP address.


Side note: Attackers have also been hitting St. GNU's IP address hard, but don't realize he has quite the elaborate networking infrastructure to mitigate such attacks :) but you can keep on hitting him, it's a great chance to stress his networking equipment!