Cyberattacks on Our Club
Standing Strong in Tough Times: How Our Photo Club Is Currently Fighting Cyberattacks. For the past four months, our beloved Photo Club has been under persistent and highly professional cyberattacks. Hackers, who clearly have access to significant computing resources such as botnets and advanced artificial intelligence, are trying to bring us down. Despite their sophisticated tactics and relentless assaults, they have not gained access to our data. The attackers primarily rely on so-called DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial of Service), flooding our website with massive amounts of data requests. This causes certain functions to become unresponsive and slows down the entire site. Rest assured, your profiles and login credentials remain secure, as passwords are stored encrypted as hash values, and our premium payment pages are fully protected.
The Challenges
In addition to the DDoS attacks, we face several other challenges:
- Massive user registrations: Despite our email confirmation links that largely control these sign-ups, there are disruptions when logging in and out. Our advice: stay logged in whenever possible.
- Spam emails: Tens of thousands of spam messages flood our inbox daily, forcing our hosting provider to temporarily block incoming emails altogether.
- Google Maps security vulnerability: An unknown security flaw in Google Maps was exploited by the attackers to insert data into our database. Thanks to our quick report, Google patched the vulnerability within a day.
- Data injection via SQL injections into our database. To fix this, we have to review and optimize hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
Particularly worrying are the attacks on our personal computers. For example, my own machine was infected with ransomware that even reached my backups. Lieke’s private email and Facebook accounts were hacked. Mik was the only one fully prepared for such an attack and is now actively working with us to secure the entire system.
Our ticket system, which relies on third-party software, was overwhelmed by massive registrations and ticket submissions. Thousands of new tickets in Cyrillic script flood the system whenever we try to delete old ones.
The Fight Against the Attackers
Despite these massive challenges, we are not giving up. We have enlisted professional help and are collaborating with Cloudflare, Google, and all-inkl.com to resolve the issue once and for all. These services are highly invested in our case and are providing strong support. Our current priority is to overhaul the entire codebase and all third-party libraries. This is an enormous task, especially since working with the external libraries requires significant time to get up to speed.
The Suspected Motive
Experts say the scale of the attackers’ efforts “is disproportionate to the size of the project.” So, we can only speculate about their exact motives. Since the attacks likely originate from Russia, we suspect they are linked to the removal of the Russian translation of our site, which we replaced with a Ukrainian one. However, yielding to this blackmail would go against our personal ethics and the values of the Photo Club.
Thanks and Looking Ahead
We want to sincerely thank all of you for your understanding during this difficult time. A big thank you also for your patience, as our support ticket system is currently only partially functional. We continue to work tirelessly to fend off the attackers and protect our Photo Club. For months now, we have been revising the entire codebase and are almost there. Together, we will overcome this challenge and emerge stronger than ever. Our unity and the support of each individual make us strong. Let’s continue to uphold the values of the Photo Club: kindness, respect, and integrity. These are the values that define us and keep us united, even in tough times.
