[Savannah-users] DDoS attack against vcs

[Bob Proulx]

Hello Savannah Users,

It was pointed out that I should have made some type of message
previously.  Apologies for not thinking of savannah-users.

For the past five days starting on the 14th there has been about a
10,000 sized botnet attacking the vcs system browsing every web
accessible URL.  This has caused a big stress on the system.  Lots of
cpu use, lots of data bandwidth consumed, but mostly lots of processes
queued.  Users have made reports of timeouts and 502 Bad Gateway proxy
failures and other brown-outs while browsing the web or checking out
project source.  No hard failures.  Retrying the action would usually
work.  But also the failure would occur again too.

Unfortuantely mitigating against a large botnet attacker with a large
collection of systems to do the attack is quite difficult.  Even very
large and well funded sites have been brought down by these attacks.
For us on the community funded FSF hosted Savannah these can be
overpowering and there isn't much we can do about it.  We took what
mitigations we could.

In any case I should have sent a notification here to savannah-users
about the current status of the problem.  Sorry for that absence of
thought.  Sorry this is a notice after the fact that it was a problem
for the past week.

The current attack seems to have subsided earlier today.  For the
moment everything seems to be back to normal.  Let's hope that
continues.

Bob