Gregory's ServerThere seems to be a GTA 5 game mod, or something, that seems to make HTTP requests directly to mastodon.social, with insane frequency. Intentional or not, it's basically a DDoS. The requests used to come with HTTP referrer "nui-game-internal" but I just found they switched their user agent to mask as a browser.
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The accounts it makes requests to are gtaliferp, gungame, arabepic, royalcity, and a bunch of others but in a similar vein... GTA or roleplay-related. Peculiarly, it's not making REST API requests, it's going straight to the ActivityPub outbox and, for some reason, WebFinger. @xorowl @jimpjorps @Gargron you can send a PR, i tried with this one :P  On the one hand its Gargrons right to allow whatever services he wants to access his API. This is no different than blocking a fediverse server. That said I think its unfair to call this a DDOS or even a misuse of the API.. In fact I'd say this is the very purpose of an activity pub endpoint, so anyone can access the data and interoperate with the server as they see fit. @freemo @mkljczk @xorowl @jimpjorps It's DDoS when their software is coded in such a way that many IPs hit the same endpoints over and over in frequent fashion when they could simply cache the results Fair, if a single client is hitting it excessively then it should be cached and isnt good etiquette for sure. Not quite sure I'd call it a DDoS but still, its bad design. @freemo @mkljczk @xorowl @jimpjorps Again, it's distributed DoS because they release this software (a game mod) to end-users whose IPs are the ones hitting the endpoints. As far as I understand, anyway. I'm currently analyzing the log files to find out how many unique IPs the requests are coming from. @Gargron @freemo @xorowl @jimpjorps itʼs for the 'community tabʼ like this and the requests are done client-side, custom server owners using FiveM can select an ap account they want to use  @Gargron @freemo @mkljczk @xorowl @jimpjorps or, put differently: Is it distributed? Yes. Does it potentially lead to denial of service (through resource exhastion)? Yes. Sounds about right. I cant speak to Gargron's setup but I think most setups would be able to handle 3400 RPM on the outbox without even batting an eye. Also by that logic if too many people start using mastodon clients on their phone or desktop then that is a DDoS since enough of them are distributed and would lead to resource depletion.  @freemo @rysiek @Gargron @mkljczk @xorowl @jimpjorps According to https://github.com/citizenfx/fivem/pull/757#issuecomment-873238836 it was 4,000 requests *per second*. That would make most instances cry. then I misread it, that is on the high side.. though depends how many users were doing it. I would imagine mastodon clients in general produce more requests per second than that collectively but we wouldnt call those a DDoS... I dunno we are arguing semantics though, does it even matter what we call it? @freemo @tek @rysiek @mkljczk @xorowl @jimpjorps For comparison, average mastodon.social traffic is 200 req/s. I don't think it matters what we call it though. In my view it's a denial-of-service when it impacts performance due to unintended use, though maybe you could expand that to intended use as well. While the individual endpoints are intended to be used, it is the frequency with which they are retrieved that is unintended.   @stux I used to block by referrer in nginx, and I'm now also blocking by user agent Requests don't come from servers but from players' IPs (I believe) which is why it's a distributed-DoS and not just a DoS.  @cjd 3600 RPM right now, though at its peak (when they used nui-game-internal) it was 24000 RPM @Gargron Ahh yeah, hard to just nginx cache that away...  @Gargron well, why would they mask their user-agent if not to conceal intentional harm? "Look no further sir, I'm an innocent web browser making a few requests, totally not a very popular game lib that will innocently kill your host under the load." 🙄 The icing on the cake is calling you out in the source code. 😆  |
@Gargron What the fuck why