Blender has confirmed that the recent website outages are due to ongoing DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks that began on Saturday.
See also: These are the largest DDoS attacks ever carried out worldwide
Blender is a popular 3D design package for creating animated films, video games, cinematic effects, soft-body and particle models, and many other applications. The project team says the attacks began over the weekend, rendering them unable to process legitimate connection requests and causing severe disruption to operations.
“Since last Saturday, November 18, servers have been under a DDoS attack, as they are overloaded with requests leading to their downfall,” the announcement.
“Administrators are working non-stop on this. Attempts to block IPs from attackers were unsuccessful, as they quickly bounced back from other locations.“
Even during the brief intervals when the attackers stopped the attacks, Blender's infrastructure remained overloaded with a high volume of pending legitimate requests, making it difficult to recover their servers. Eventually, after four days of continuous problems, the team moved their main website to CloudFlare, which they say helped reduce the impact of the attacks.
Statistics published by Blender COO Francesco Siddion X show that the attacks are continuing, with over 240 million fake requests directed at the project's servers.
See also: UK: Royal family website offline due to DDoS attack
Blender warns that the following problems may be encountered when trying to use its services and websites:
- For some users, accessing the website requires solving a robot detection “challenge”.
- The website “blender.org” may still be inaccessible for technical reasons, but “www.blender.org” is working.
- The websites hosting Blender's code, developer documentation ,devtalk, wiki, and download portal are still unavailable.
The perpetrators behind the Blender attacks and their motives are currently unknown. In case the outages return in the coming days, it is important to note that downloading Blender from third-party websites or results promoted in Google search may lead to infections.
If you're looking to get a Blender installer and the official website is down, you can always find a non-digital rights version from Steam, which doesn't require the Valve client to run. Blender is also available via GitHub, while Windows users can also get it directly from the Microsoft Apps Store.
The common targets of DDoS attacks are websites and servers. Attackers send a large volume of traffic to the target, overloading network resources and bringing them down. This results in users being unable to access the website or servers losing functionality.
See also: Rostelecom Russia: DDoS attacks in 2022 broke all records
DDoS attacks can also target network infrastructure, such as routers and switches. This can cause internet for users or even cause connectivity between networks to be lost.
Additionally, DDoS attacks can target businesses and organizations with the aim of causing financial losses or losing customer trust. This can lead to lost revenue and damage to the business' reputation.
Finally, DDoS attacks can target government organizations and websites, with the aim of disrupting their operations or causing political unrest. This can have serious consequences for security and trust in cyberspace.
Source: bleepingcomputer
