For some context, CPU usage jumped when the traffic started... and dropped after the block was applied:
Meta
Discussion about the aussie.zone instance itself
What sort of block if I can ask? blocking AI bots or blocking Russian bots?
The unusual traffic all appeared to be coming from one location on the internet, with the same user agent string. Any traffic from that network will now receive a captcha from Cloudflare. I'm not aware of any lemmy instances hosted there, but will keep an eye on things.
I'm all for captcha use to limit bots and this kind of stuff, which effectively became a DDoS.
And for anyone curious... blue line is traffic from a country we don't normally see much traffic from. The unusual spike, then drop when I blocked the specific sources:
It's probably Nicole. She's mad that she can't spam us any longer.
Definitely noticed someyuwas up today. Not just here but lags across a few different websites - my speeds were fine so I wondered if it was a broader DNS or DDoS attacks
The traffic stopped a few hours back, from all IPs at once. Definitely seems to have been some sort of deliberate action.
I's thinking something was up today!
An odd place to attack or try spam, but I guess if you have unlimited resources you would hit anywhere
Could be a trial attack.
I noticed something was up. I'd seen some meta posts about other instances updating so I wondered if it was a bug or federation issue but obviously not.
Definitely some concerning stuff!