Hello users!

I sent out a notification to all online users yesterday informing of an emergency Prosody restart due to an attack. Don’t worry though, it doesn’t affect the security of the server itself! It seems the goal was to exhaust resources (CPU/Memory/Storage). I’ve implemented some counter-measures to prevent this from causing the server’s load to spike as high as it did. As of yesterday mod_limits has been enabled. This should prevent any single connection whether C2S or S2S from hogging up system resources. I’ve also witnessed attacks that spam offline users with messages going up to 20GB in some cases. XMPP.is stores offline messages and there was no limit set before I noticed. I’ve setup a cron job to find and delete offline messages (every minute) above a certain file size to prevent some malicious spammer from filling up the entire disk.

This attack didn’t really do all that much though… It brought down the registration page a few times but everything else stayed up.

Full attack traffic (48 hours):

CPU usage (48 hours):