Gyroscopic Investing

Posted: **Wed May 07, 2025 8:20 pm**

Hi folks,

Sorry about the recent availability issues. It looks like we're receiving a DOS attack from Singapore, Russia, and Vietnam. I've blocked a bunch of IP addresses.

Posted: **Wed May 07, 2025 8:32 pm**

Xan wrote: ↑Wed May 07, 2025 8:20 pm Hi folks,

Sorry about the recent availability issues. It looks like we're receiving a DOS attack from Singapore, Russia, and Vietnam. I've blocked a bunch of IP addresses.

Thanks for defending us!

Posted: **Wed May 07, 2025 8:35 pm**

I wonder what they want with a little forum.

Posted: **Wed May 07, 2025 8:38 pm**

Some men just want to watch the world burn.

Posted: **Wed May 07, 2025 9:38 pm**

dualstow wrote: ↑Wed May 07, 2025 8:35 pm I wonder what they want with a little forum.

It's not like if they establish a beachhead here that that allows them to conquer all the rest of the world's forums ...

Posted: **Thu May 08, 2025 5:22 am**

Thanks for the update Xan, and for all you do to administer this forum.
Blessings.

Posted: **Thu May 08, 2025 12:04 pm**

Xan wrote: ↑Wed May 07, 2025 8:38 pm Some men just want to watch the world burn.

Felt like a quote, but I had to look it up.

Thank you, Xan, for your hard work and time put in.

Posted: **Fri May 09, 2025 12:44 pm**

There have been a lot of robotic user registrations lately. 497 of 3,352 total accounts were registered in the past week.

These accounts don't seem to be spamming the forum. The only effect seems to be that I'm getting a fair number of email bounces from registration confirmation emails.

The email addresses seem to often be in different countries from the IP addresses. My only guess at this point as to why somebody is doing this is to cause people to click Spam in order to keep the forum from being able to send email notifications to anybody. At least, that's the only effect I can see, so it's my guess as to the purpose. Why somebody would want to do that, I don't know.

I've switched from a simple "type the letters in this image" to reCaptcha on the registration page. Let's see if it helps.

Posted: **Fri May 09, 2025 2:08 pm**

Xan wrote: ↑Fri May 09, 2025 12:44 pm There have been a lot of robotic user registrations lately. 497 of 3,352 total accounts were registered in the past week.

These accounts don't seem to be spamming the forum. The only effect seems to be that I'm getting a fair number of email bounces from registration confirmation emails.

The email addresses seem to often be in different countries from the IP addresses. My only guess at this point as to why somebody is doing this is to cause people to click Spam in order to keep the forum from being able to send email notifications to anybody. At least, that's the only effect I can see, so it's my guess as to the purpose. Why somebody would want to do that, I don't know.

I've switched from a simple "type the letters in this image" to reCaptcha on the registration page. Let's see if it helps.

Perhaps it’s AI trying to learn all the wisdom presented by this outstanding group of gurus and wizards.

Posted: **Thu May 15, 2025 9:46 am**

Okay, I've determined that we've been under a distributed "Slow Loris" attack. Having deployed specific countermeasures to that, I should no longer need to be playing whack-a-mole with IP addresses.

No idea why anybody would want to shut down this forum, though.

Posted: **Thu May 15, 2025 9:54 am**

Xan wrote: ↑Thu May 15, 2025 9:46 am Okay, I've determined that we've been under a distributed "Slow Loris" attack. Having deployed specific countermeasures to that, I should no longer need to be playing whack-a-mole with IP addresses.

No idea why anybody would want to shut down this forum, though.

My money is on a salty bogleheads forum member that doesn’t like us.

I can think of a few.

Posted: **Thu May 15, 2025 9:58 am**

Xan wrote: ↑Thu May 15, 2025 9:46 am Okay, I've determined that we've been under a distributed "Slow Loris" attack. Having deployed specific countermeasures to that, I should no longer need to be playing whack-a-mole with IP addresses.

No idea why anybody would want to shut down this forum, though.

Wow! Thanks again Xan for all you do. I'd never heard of that "Slow Loris" attack. The nefarious do-badders are certainly crafty beasts.

Posted: **Thu May 15, 2025 1:11 pm**

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_loris

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowloris_(cyber_attack)

Posted: **Sat May 17, 2025 2:48 pm**

Last year, as we went live with a project in Germany, all attacks came from Russia.
Off:
Just 6 months before the suggested date of Bulgaria joining the EURO area, our president decided its good to have a referendum against accepting the EUR currency, nice, ah. Russian hands are long, very long.
Yet another recent case, you might not be aware of, but widely proclaimed : Six Bulgarians jailed after spying for Russia in UK.

Posted: **Sat May 17, 2025 7:50 pm**

botnets practicing and probing. The only evil genius that thinks about this forum is vinny

Posted: **Sun May 18, 2025 7:25 am**

Vil wrote: ↑Sat May 17, 2025 2:48 pm Last year, as we went live with a project in Germany, all attacks came from Russia.
Off:
Just 6 months before the suggested date of Bulgaria joining the EURO area, our president decided its good to have a referendum against accepting the EUR currency, nice, ah. Russian hands are long, very long.
Yet another recent case, you might not be aware of, but widely proclaimed : Six Bulgarians jailed after spying for Russia in UK.

I heard about the spy case, but forgot they were Bulgarian.

Posted: **Thu Feb 19, 2026 8:10 am**

Hi folks,

We seem to be under a distributed denial of service attack. There is no one IP or IP range to block. I've tried to tweak things to allow the service to mostly operate. If you see an error, just refresh and try again. Sorry about the trouble.

It might be possible to largely mitigate by (temporarily) filtering out non-US addresses. I'm hesitant to do that, of course, because we do have international folks.

Posted: **Thu Feb 19, 2026 9:00 am**

Xan wrote: ↑Thu Feb 19, 2026 8:10 am Hi folks,

We seem to be under a distributed denial of service attack. There is no one IP or IP range to block. I've tried to tweak things to allow the service to mostly operate. If you see an error, just refresh and try again. Sorry about the trouble.

It might be possible to largely mitigate by (temporarily) filtering out non-US addresses. I'm hesitant to do that, of course, because we do have international folks.

Communication outside the approved channels (Facebook, Google, Twitter) will not be tolerated.

Posted: **Thu Feb 19, 2026 11:52 am**

Xan wrote: ↑Thu Feb 19, 2026 8:10 am Hi folks,

We seem to be under a distributed denial of service attack. There is no one IP or IP range to block. I've tried to tweak things to allow the service to mostly operate. If you see an error, just refresh and try again. Sorry about the trouble.

It might be possible to largely mitigate by (temporarily) filtering out non-US addresses. I'm hesitant to do that, of course, because we do have international folks.

No worries. Thanks for keeping this place up and running.

Honestly, it would be kind of fun to see a forum only available to IP addresses from a certain small country. And the "secret handshake" to getting into the club would be by setting your VPN to said country.

My money is on NotNiceParticularWoman DDOSing us.

Posted: **Fri Feb 20, 2026 2:03 am**

We're not important enough to DDOS. Maybe host is getting hit. Big hosts stuff as many sites as they can onto a box and dont stop until service degrades.

I researched small, quality hosts recently and went with https://billing.nixihost.com/aff.php?aff=384 but Cloudflare should solve the problem for free.

Unrelated, they're saying colon cancer is up in young people and a friend is getting colonoscopy tomorrow. But https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMRS4-ng8T0

ofc, Prasad was called a psycho anti-vaxer not long ago.

edit1: https://old.reddit.com/r/Millennials/co ... illing_us/

Posted: **Fri Feb 20, 2026 5:09 pm**

It wouldn’t be a boglerdude post if there weren’t something about vaxxes and/or masks

@Xan, how do I make these Linode alert emails stop

Or not stop, but can I reduce them to once a week?

Posted: **Fri Feb 20, 2026 5:15 pm**

Sorry about the emails, dualstow. I've turned off the CPU alerts for this machine.

Good news is it looks like the torrent has abated, at least for now. Let's hope it stays that way.

boglerdude, if the host were struggling, things would be slow for no reason apparent to our system. But that's not the case. The forum has been flooded with requests from dispersed IP addresses.

Posted: **Sun Feb 22, 2026 1:30 pm**

Why on earth would anyone bother to attack our forum? Strange.

Posted: **Sun Feb 22, 2026 3:29 pm**

Smith1776 wrote: ↑Sun Feb 22, 2026 1:30 pm Why on earth would anyone bother to attack our forum? Strange.

I’m with you. I might put it in the same category as why people climb Mt.Everest. Just because they can.

Posted: **Sun Feb 22, 2026 4:02 pm**

Smith1776 wrote: ↑Sun Feb 22, 2026 1:30 pm Why on earth would anyone bother to attack our forum? Strange.

It is quite strange. It's not unusual for us to get bogged down by a DoS attack. I block an IP range and problem solved. I've never seen one distributed like this one before, though.

As for why, no earthly idea. Maybe it's practice?

Gyroscopic Investing

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