Month: April 2023

FCM Website Attacked by Bots.

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The Friends of Community Media website (ourfcm.org) was recently under an attack seemingly by DoS bots (dedicated denial of service), designed to overload the system.

This was done with fake bot email addresses. Many of these were fake email addresses with an address that had the domain name appended to the email address as .ru – an extension representing Russia. The FCM website originally used to require a registration before viewing it. Each of these fake emails became registered and started to fill up the FCM WordPress database.

This was a mistake and made the site vulnerable.

With this attack up to10 new registrations a day started occurring starting in January, 2023. These eventually mounted up to over 5,000 fake addresses which had to be manually deleted.

To respond, the admin of ourfcm.com stopped people requiring to be registered on the site. Also, a message was sent back to some of the phony emails that said, “Mumakhala ngati nyani akuphanguka” – an appropriate phrase in another language. Responses to the FCM message were kicked back as not being real email addresses.

Unfortunately many sites like this one, are subject to attack by the deniers of free information-flow that can challenge authoritarians and dictators.