Widespread AO3 fanfiction platform goes down in wave of DDoS assaults

The favored fanfiction platform Archive of Our Personal (AO3) is presently experiencing a wave of distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults which have compelled the web site offline since Monday. AO3 first acknowledged the outage on the corporate’s official Twitter account on July tenth at 8.24AM ET, later confirming that the problem was brought on by “a DDoS assault” — a malicious cybercrime wherein menace actors overwhelm a server with site visitors — “inflicting the servers to fall over.”

A gaggle claiming to be Nameless Sudan has taken credit score for the assault, and is demanding a ransom to cease the continuing operation.

The AO3 group is presently attempting to defend towards the assault and restore the platform, warning that customers might expertise numerous error messages or encounter show points with the positioning structure within the meantime. (The location has been fully unreachable for hours in our testing.) The corporate stated that as a result of DDoS assaults don’t compromise personal person information, there’s no want for customers to vary their password in response to the outage. On the time of writing, no estimated timeline has been supplied relating to when the archive can be again on-line. We now have reached out to the Group for Transformative Works, the non-profit father or mother group of AO3, for remark and can replace this story if we hear again.

A gaggle on the Telegram messaging service claiming to be ‘hacktivist’ group Nameless Sudan has taken credit score for the assault. In response to menace intelligence vendor Flashpoint, Nameless Sudan has been lively since January 2023, claiming accountability for DDoS assaults towards Microsoft and numerous firms round Europe, although it seems that the group has no credible affiliation with the nation of Sudan or the earlier Nameless group that operated inside it.

AO3 has warned that these claims needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. “A gaggle presenting themselves as a collective of religiously and politically motivated hackers has claimed accountability for the assault,” the platform tweeted on Monday. “Cybersecurity specialists consider the group claiming accountability is mendacity about their affiliation and causes for attacking web sites. View the group’s statements with skepticism.”

The Nameless Sudan group initially claimed the assault would persist for as much as 24 hours, however has since issued a ransom demand for $30k price of Bitcoin, threatening to maintain AO3 down for weeks if the corporate doesn’t comply. The Group for Transformative Works (and its AO3 mission) is completely supported by person donations and run by volunteers, which suggests the corporate is unlikely to have the ability to afford such a ransom even when this menace is revealed to be real.