I know this isn’t the kind of news Linux fans were hoping to read on Christmas Day, but unfortunately, on a day meant for faith, kindness, and hope, others are choosing to act in exactly the opposite way.
Many of you probably remember the problems Arch faced just a few months ago due to massive DDoS attacks, which mainly affected the AUR. Sadly, just when it seemed those issues were behind, a new large-scale DDoS attack on Christmas Day once again made the distribution’s website effectively inaccessible.
I know the Arch community is kind of rough, but any reason we know of that they’re being targeted? Feels like a weird target for any major actors to prioritize for destabilization.
What?
I’ve heard sometimes arbitrary targets are chosen to demonstrate capabilities. It’s marketing.
Anybody more tech-savvy than my grandma can order botnet attacks nowadays. And due to it’s memed community it’s an obvious target.
On a more tinfoil hat note: Arch is the base of SteamOS…
I feel like this all started around that time that there was that article that mentioned the most popular desktop environments on Arch Linux from repo stats where KDE plasma was the highest with over double gnome.
Clearly gnome foundation salty
The attacks started before that retarded non-news post. And no one actually cares about DE’s, other that youngings still in their hopping phase.
I seem to recall hearing speculation that the person behind this had their AUR packages deleted because they were posting malware. I’ve only heard this second-hand so it could be complete bullshit, but it seems plausible given some of the fucking adult babies we have out in the world.
AUR malware and DDoS attacks are not even correlated, for there to be any minimally credible speculation about causation.
Such “speculation” would only come from someone very unintelligent who would see two news items about X within a smallish time frame (weeks), then obtusely start drawing connection lines between them where there is probably* none.
* We don’t know who the malware spreaders or the DDoS attackers are. So we can’t be 100% certain about anything. But indications point to script kiddies being behind AUR malware attempts. And a more sophisticated entity behind the DDoS attacks, not just some kid or an adult with a grudge paying a botnet, like some are sillily suggesting. One should also not forget that there was always the conspiracy theory that DDoS protection service providers are behind most DDoS attacks (before AI crawlers accidentally took that crown).
You don’t have to be an adult to post malware and hire DDoS botnets
DDoS is cheap to buy on the dark web it could be anybody with a grudge and a few thousand USD. It often costs more to mitigate the attacks than to launch them.