Some Updates on the DDoS

[Brought over from the other blog domain; comments have been left unimported]

Not much to say about the incident at this point, but I’ll just clarify some things on our side.

[ninja-edit]
By the way, we’re on IRC (#bakabt on irc.rizon.net). Feel free to drop by if you like (although most of the time we’re talking about things other than the DDoS).
You can use Rizon webchat, just register with nickserv (/msg nickserv register [password] [email]) and identify (/msg nickserv identify [password]) before joining (/join bakabt).
roffamaffia is here too, under the nick UchihaSasuke, so you can tell him how much you love him (/msg UchihaSasuke hello there).

Site downtime
Site is still down because the host nullrouted it. It’s nullrouted because despite roffa/Sasuke-/0xyG3N saying he’ll stop the DDoS, for some reason we’re still getting heavy traffic on our line (as reported by our host). This is at least 10 times heavier than normal usage and is just slightly below our peak bandwidth cap, so while the site would be barely useable if it was brought up, it would cost us a hell lot in bandwidth usage. I don’t think it’s possible that many users constantly checking on the site status would generate that much traffic.

Our stand
We refuse to give in because we have zero assurance that the DDoS would stop for good if we do (and why would Jarudin step down as requested anyway?). We got DDoSed once for banning him in accordance with the site policy of no stathacking. We got DDoSed again because he didn’t like one of our blog posts. Based on this trend there is fair reason to believe that any time he finds something he doesn’t like about us, we’ll get DDoSed again.

Giving in to each DDoS he pulls off isn’t going to do any good for us in the long run, so we decided to draw the line early. We will have to make a stand sooner or later at this rate anyway.

Anti-DDOS measures?
Yeah, that’s one possibility, but we’ve prided ourselves on staying financially low-maintenance. While we do get lots of donations (server costs are quickly covered soon after opening donations), we’d rather not spend them. We do this out of our own interest and sense of volunteerism, a sentiment I’m sure many of you other community site-owners share, and would like to see the site continue to be sustained without requiring lots of funds, which is donors’ money that should not be carelessly spent.

Getting into a DDoS arms race would be taxing, both financially and also in terms of the effort it takes to stay updated on the latest developments, related information, and news. A one-time DoS fix would be lovely, but we hope not to have to use it as a feasible long-term strategy.

I’ve read the report over at TorrentFreak, as well as all the comments that have been posted, and thank you all for your generous support; We’ve had lots of help offers pouring in through PM, which is really touching. If there are reasonable solutions I believe we have exhausted them. We will look into implementing basic ways of prevention, but I think it still holds true that any solution to prevent dedicated attacks will require serious resources or hardware.

It is a real shame that the people really feeling the pain of this are the users, not the site staff! (As many would attest, we’ve been way too busy to be watching that much anime lately anyway >.<)

Future plans: still no DHT
By the way, we have no plans to add DHT to our torrents, because we can’t find a way to do it and still have accurate stat-tracking for our uploaders. But there is nothing in our site policy stopping people from making DHT-enabled or tracker-less versions of our torrents and submitting them elsewhere (and not like we can stop people doing that with “site policy” anyway, right?) Once it’s on your hard drive, it’s yours to do with as you please 🙂