this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
26 points (100.0% liked)

Meta

709 readers
13 users here now

Discussion about the aussie.zone instance itself

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
admin@aussie.zone
lodion@aussie.zone
26
More AZ issues 19/8/25 (aussie.zone)
submitted 1 month ago by lodion@aussie.zone to c/meta@aussie.zone
21 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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....

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] maniacalmanicmania@aussie.zone 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Think it's the same AI scraping crap everyone is getting smashed by?

[–] Nath@aussie.zone 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.zone 2 points 1 month 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.