We experienced a massive attack on the website this morning, and the site was offline for several hours while the attack continued. To mitigate the attack, we changed the Cloudflare setup so that it challenges all connections to the website. This defeats these types of attack, but it means that when you connect to our site, you will see a Cloudflare verification screen before accessing Stovebolt. We may disable this in a while, once we're certain the attack has ceased, but it will be reimplemented if it resumes.

We also added a rate limiting rule that should stop these types of attack going forward.

We want to thank you again for your patience while we deal with these unexpected issues. The internet has changed a lot, and some of it not for the better. I have no idea why someone(s) is attacking us, but the reasons don't matter. W'e're working hard to ensure that these problems don't affect us in the future.

As one example, we added a block for Meta Ireland yesterday. So far, over 202,000 connections have been blocked. I have no idea why Meta (which is Facebook) feels the need to hammer out site, but they won't be doing it any longer.

This announcement will be global for two days.

Paul Schmehl CI 6
geek@stovebolt.com
Stovebolt Staff: Geek