AO3 Fanfiction site forced offline due to DDoS attacks

Popular fanfiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) is currently facing a wave of distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which has taken the website offline since Monday. AO3 first reported the outage on the company’s official Twitter account on July 10 at 8:24 a.m. ET. to be confirmed later The problem was caused by a “DDoS attack”—a malicious cybercrime in which threat actors flood servers with traffic—”causing the servers to go down.”

An unidentified group claiming to be Sudan has claimed credit for the attack, and is demanding a ransom to halt the ongoing operation.

The AO3 team is currently attempting to defend against the attack and restore the platform, warning that in the meantime users may experience various error messages or encounter performance issues with the site layout. (The site remained completely inaccessible for hours in our testing.) The company said that because DDoS attacks do not compromise private user data, there is no need for users to change their passwords in response to the outage. At the time of writing, no estimated timeline has been provided for when the collection will return online. have reached us organizations for transformative workAO3’s nonprofit parent organization reached out for comment and will update this story if we hear back.

A group claiming to be the ‘hacktivist’ organization Anonymous Sudan claimed credit for the attack on the Telegram messaging service. by threat intelligence vendor Flash pointUnknown Sudan active since January 2023 and claiming responsibility for DDoS attacks against Microsoft various companies around EuropeHowever, the group appears to have no credible affiliation with the country of Sudan or a previous unidentified group operating within it.

AO3 cautions that these claims should be taken with a pinch of salt. “A group presenting itself as a religious and politically motivated group of hackers claimed responsibility for the attack,” the forum tweeted on Monday. ,cyber security specialist believe that the group claiming responsibility is lying about its affiliation and reasons for attacking the websites. View the group’s statements with skepticism.”

The anonymous Sudanese group initially claimed the attack would continue for 24 hours, but has since issued a ransom demand for $30k worth of bitcoin, threatening to shut down AO3 for weeks if the company does not comply. threatened. The Organization for Transformative Works (and its AO3 project) is entirely supported by user donations and operated by volunteers, which means the company is unlikely to be able to pay such a ransom even if the threat were real.