Postby Zoop » Tue Jan 14, 2020 9:25 am

A DOS doesn't have to be on purpose.

It can happen when for example, some spambot is being overly zealous and requests too much from the server in a small span of time.

Or some bug/error in software, causing to poll the site in an infinite loop.

Or simply too much traffic.



A DDOS tho (extra d for distributed) means, a lot of traffic from different locations.

So that can still happen when theres simply too much traffic, for example.



Though normally most servers would provide enough overhead to be able to deal with minor bogdowns like that.

But still, unless more information is available, its a bit premature to start suspecting old members.

Besides, hiring a botnet can be expensive, and not too mention dangerous when getting caught with it, altho there are plenty of dumb script kiddies out there. Anyway you don't need skills (as you put it) to pull something like that off. Just the right connections



I'm willing to bet it's probably some random malware-bot, looking for exploits to plant itself in.

I believe its possible in older phpBB's to cause an overflow by spamming the server, in which it defaults back to non SSH (non secure) connections which allows more messing with (tho this is more than a decade ago). Just a sad side-effect of being a decently popular forum thats been around for so long ...



In my experience tho, unless theres money to be gotten from it, this usually is some random process coming from some country. And not really a directed attack. Ofcourse it could still be a directed attack out of spite by old members or something. But i'd say thats unlikely (unless they really are THAT dumb)