Postmortem of a little community hobby wiki struggling to survive an extinction-event-tier DDOS purely because they banned one guy for using Claude on the wiki https://blog.xkeeper.net/the-cutting-room-floor/tcrf-2026-ddos-postmortem/
@0xabad1dea
I will never understand why these slopherders take it as such a personal offense when their bot gets blocked. Between this and the constant scraping ddos and the various stories of "AI agents" making call-out blogs, it feels like it's just an automated contempt machine
Whose operators deserve steel-toed boots delivered at high speed to their various nether regions. Committing a DDOS like that, knowingly and with malice aforethought, should mean that the DDOSser and his cohorts don't breathe free air or have internet for long enough that they'll be old and grey and have three marbles left in their heads. I have no patience and less empathy for these monkeyfeathers.
Sep 24, 2026, 8:02 PMTCRF is such a fantastic resource too. Man fuck that guy.
Sep 24, 2026, 8:18 PM@Dio9sys @0xabad1dea
Because the very idea of consent is an affront to their ego.
Edit: A typo that ruined the meaning.
@Dio9sys @0xabad1dea May I propose that it is just a modern day representation of internalized misogny and colonization? The people who get personally offended when other's set boundaries are abusive in some capacity?
Oh gosh, I would love to know who the twitter bluecheck was......
@csolisr @0xabad1dea @majirubi
Like, seriously, how important is this teeny-tiny corner of the internet to him? Move on, dudebro, move on lol
blech - thank you!
Sep 24, 2026, 8:42 PM@csolisr Do you see any problem with AI companies creating an excessive price premium on the tools needed to deal with them or nah?
Sep 24, 2026, 8:16 PM@0xabad1dea This is a lot of words (and actions) for them to reach the conclusion that yes, they do have to sign up for Cloudflare – which solves it immediately.
I don't *like* it as a solution but I don't have another one. And they could have done it in the first minute.
@tomw @0xabad1dea Yes, this is one of the things that many anti-CloudFlare folks often don't seem to get - there's no one else out there that does what they do.
They're a dogshit company led by dogshit people, but they will eat a giant DDoS and laugh about it for free while everyone else will charge you hundreds of dollars a month if they can even successfully mitigate it.
Is it sustainable? Probably not, but for the time being they're basically it and that sucks.
@fwaggle @tomw @0xabad1dea What's wrong with Fastly?
@drgroftehauge @fwaggle @tomw read the link
@fwaggle @tomw @0xabad1dea From what I understand, a lot of the anger comes from DDOSers using Cloudflare as protection.
@Epic_Null @tomw @0xabad1dea Yes, that's *part* of the "dogshit company", and I assure you it's actually worse than just "profit from both sides protection racket" if you dig in.
But that doesn't change the fact that you can either go with them and make the problem go away for free (after rotating the ip of the origin and ensuring the new one doesn't leak, as per the article) or you can try someone with better ethics and likely find out you can't afford it, if it even works.
This world sucks 😭
@tomw @0xabad1dea I guess they should've asked you.
Sep 25, 2026, 7:26 PM@ertchin @0xabad1dea or anyone who has ever dealt with a DDoS before
@tomw @0xabad1dea Anyone? But some of them might not have been as forthright as you.
@tomw @0xabad1dea And Cloudflare is the service that protects the DDOS operators. Along with ISPs who protect users whose compromised devices source the DDOS traffic.
@0xabad1dea Providers of DDOS as a Service need to be fed their own toes as a last meal, then yeeted off a cliff into a flaming dumpster.
@linuxandyarn @0xabad1dea Nah, a slow, incurable rot from the inside out, an excruciating pain of a thousand cuts and unstoppable exsanguination.
Or, there's Menzie's Sphere of Immolation..
@0xabad1dea Fucking hell. The bigger the ego, the smaller the dick, indeed.
Sep 24, 2026, 10:22 PMPeople keep talking about prompt injection like it's a real thing. It's no one's fault but your own if you decide to use a tool that treats everything it sees as a command.
It is an excellent report.
The main problem with DDoS is money.
You can get DDoSed even if you DROP every packet.
Pay some Danegeld, and you buy protection.
Nice website you have there, be a shame if something happened to it.
Sep 24, 2026, 11:36 PM@0xabad1dea oh that block image is just *chefs kiss*
Sep 25, 2026, 7:22 AMThere's a person who decided to ban bot traffic from their own site, and there's a person who committed a felony in response. Definitely a 'both sides' situation according to HN comments.
Sep 25, 2026, 12:36 AM@0xabad1dea I love the prompt injection and the 403 page. A work of art.
@0xabad1dea If you have any clues as to who the offender is, you might be able to get them banned from Claude itself. It not, Claude can be considered a return address on this attack.
AI is really resource intensive, so don't DDOS them unless their water and electricity use is already maxxed out and each garbage prompt will block a real one.
I can think of lots of other ways to make things difficult for Claude and for Claude users however...
@0xabad1dea One thing I would do different regarding tor:
For what I do, allowing Tor access can be very seriously important, I have even been in a situation where I had to use Tor for all internet activity to avoid broadcasting my position.
Therefore, if a site I ran was being attacked over Tor, I would look for a way to temporarily block single Tor exit nodes and clear the block when the offending traffic moves on to another exit node. In my situation as an opposition activist against an open Fascist country, keeping Tor blocked is not an option unless the alternative is that the DDOS threatens Tor itself. In that case I would be obligated to yield to the needs of all other Tor users.
An attacker able to saturate all Tor exit nodes would be unlikely, would be a major problem for all Tor users, and such an event would probably force changes in Tor itself.
Note that this is site-type and content specific: a site used for discussing gaming doesn't need to be accessable over Tor to protect people from harm, an activist site may well have to be.
Personally I detest all this AI slop. I shoot video with real cameras, and if the time ever comes that AI "video" doesn't usually contain obvious errors it will be impossible to prove that say, an ICE agent shot someone for their skin color by catching them on video firing the gun. They'll demand proof the video wasn't AI if it goes to court (or even the Court of Public Opinion) and that may become impossible in the future.
@0xabad1dea Hi there,
First of all: I'm sorry to hear about everything you had to go through. I sincerely hope those attacks stop rather sooner than later.
I also want to thank you for your detailed writeup. It was very insightful. I hope I never encounter such an attack myself, but if I do I now know what I can do.
@0xabad1dea thanks. good read.
@0xabad1dea what a fucking blunder from Fastly 🤦♂️
@0xabad1dea I really hope legal action is taken, and if Claud helped this guy access a botnet, then the AI company should be held responsible too.
