Seeing what appears to be a distributed scrape or AZ coming from multiple network from multiple overseas locations. From what I can tell predominantly bon English speaking countries.

I’ve had to be pretty heavy handed with the catpcha challenges for those countries for now. It seems to have helped, will keep an eye on things. Hopefully not too much collateral damage to legitimate users…

  • Nath@aussie.zone
    8·
    2 months ago

    Possibly. It’d be a terrible way to get that data if so. You could just spin up a Lemmy instance and federate with all of Lemmy far easier than trying to scrape all the web front-ends. Also, we try to fly under the radar from the Internet a bit. We opt out of Google searches, Amazon, Apple and GPTBot for example.

    While our data is all human-generated (attractive), we’re a pretty small userbase. There are shinier web sites to scrape than us.

    • Gorgritch_Umie_Killa@aussie.zone
      1·
      2 months ago

      Whats the difference between this event and a DDoS event?

      I was able to access AZ on the browser during the downtime period, i’d assume that wouldn’t be the case with a DDoS?

      • Lodion 🇦🇺@aussie.zoneOPM
        2·
        2 months ago

        Recent issues appear to be AI bots scraping lemmy content, posing as legitimate user traffic.

        The difference between this and a regular DDoS is the intent behind it. I don’t believe the traffic we’re seeing is intended to be malicious as with a DDoS, but due to the incompetence of those behind the scraping… it effectively is a DDoS.