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Hello,

Many things happened in the last week but I didn't had time to prepare this post.

First, as probably many of you noticed in the last weekend and the beginning of the week our site experienced a very strange visibility issue around the world.

I chased this issue which was manifesting like this: at interval of a few minutes our site was accessible then inaccessible at different locations on all continents. This manifested randomly but continuously.

After investigating the firewall logs for possible attacks and checking for possible local connectivity issues of our server I came to the conclusion it was nothing wrong locally but it was a DNS propagation/caching issue of our domain manifesting randomy on all continents.

As example this was the situation at some locations at intervals of 5 minutes (green markers means our site was visible at those locations, yellow markers means our site was not visible at those locations):

My investigation shown a previous/wrong IP was associated with our domain at random intervals all around the world and the visitors trying to access BeyondUnity.org were pointed to that IP which was no longer our server's current IP. Therefore no server was present at that IP to answer to their browsers requests. 

I gathered as much as possible information for diagnosting and debugging then I contacted our DNS provider telling them about the problem.

I collaborated very well with Joshua from our DNS provider (it's not the first time I work with him, he is always very involved and helpful) and he told me this is a very strange issue. As a matter of fact I was using their free DNS services for many years and I never had a issue like this.

At the beginning of the week the issue was resolved, this is the current visibility status right now:

Maybe it was a side-effect of the recent CrowdStrike issue which affected the big networks in the entire world, the cause was not clear but the important thing was to fix the problem.

Or, I don't know, maybe someone thought if they can't take the "citadel" they could try to cut its communications roads ? This is another possibility.

I'm saying this because as our members already know since we came online our site is under various attacks which are stopped by our firewall every day.

There are days when we have spikes of tens of thusands of deflected attacks, this is how a calm period looks like:

Also we have daily waves of membership requests from spammers and bots trying to make fake accounts on our site, here is just a small sample:

If we would let them on our site probable we would have thousands of fake members by now.

The algorithm we developed for our site is rejecting a membership request only when it finds 100% evidence that the source of the request is a bot or a spammer. We don't need fake members.

Considering the kind of research we do and the information we're sharing with the public we prepared ourselves for this kind of attacks and our site is handling them automatically since we came online.

Imagine a site not having this kind of protection like the old aboveunity site, this is a explanation how that site "aquired" hundreds of useless fake accounts which are there just to consume that site's resources (processor, memory etc.). 😉

Another thing I worked on this week was to aquire a UPS for our server so there will not be any future incidents like it happened 5 weeks ago.

From now on in the case of a power outage the UPS will keep our server, router and the fiber-optics modem powered for about 1:45 to 2 hours so the site will keep functioning (if our ISP's fiber-optics equipment outside of the building still have power):

If the power outage's duration takes longer than that when the battery is almost depleted the UPS will send the shutdown command to the server and will wait for the power to comeback then I can turn on the server (including remotely).

During the entire week I simulated power outages to verify in all kind of scenarios the things are working as expected, here are some images taken during one of those simulations:

Everything seems fine, our site's endurance is stronger now handling the situations of possible power outages or power spikes (which usually are not happening that often in the area).

Regards,

Fighter