Today, like the past few days, we have had some downtime. Apparently some script kids are enjoying themselves by targeting our server (and others). Sorry for the inconvenience.
Most of these ‘attacks’ are targeted at the database, but some are more ddos-like and can be mitigated by using a CDN. Some other Lemmy servers are using Cloudflare, so we know that works. Therefore we have chosen Cloudflare as CDN / DDOS protection platform for now. We will look into other options, but we needed something to be implemented asap.
For the other attacks, we are using them to investigate and implement measures like rate limiting etc.
CloudFlare IP ranges can be found here. The DNS entry can point to any one of those IP addresses.
I think Ryan is referring to the usual requirement that the server’s IP address is changed if switching to a CDN to avoid DDoS, since otherwise the attackers can usually just bypass the CDN by sending requests to the original IP of the server.
Not an issue if you only accept request from the cloudflare IPs and reject everything else
Depends on how big the attack is I think - inbound connection handling is not free, even if you’re just rejecting
I mean, on your origin you can control the firewall of your own webserver. If you only accept https from the cloudflare IPs everyone using your Url should be patched thought cloudflare without issue and the attack wouldn’t be much of a problem as they would be rejected. I use this method on some of my website at work.