Actual Attacks

For a theoretical discussion of what is possible, see here. This page lists actual hostile attacks which we are reasonably confident have occurred, against the network or against our infrastructure.

Ages ago: China's Golden Shield has blocked our website since time immemorial, along with any other site containing the term "freenet". There are many meanings of "freenet", and it seems all of them are bad from their perspective. This includes both keyword blocking and DNS poisoning (dyndns IPs are also scrambled, which affects some of our users).

August 2005: Link layer: Testing shows the Golden Shield blocks Freenet 0.5 outgoing connections (this is not NAT, we could connect, but the connections got killed when they sent the 0.5 session bytes). If we told you more, we'd have to kill you. :)

Most of 2007: Frost: Spam on various boards. Anonymous floods, signed floods, Message of Death attacks (some zeroday i.e. discovered by spammer), duplicating real messages on different boards, most recently an ALICE bot answering every post not its own. Strangely enough he isn't attempting to flood the boards: his attack does however make life extremely difficult for newbies. Oldies can just turn off CHECK and only see messages from their friends and which their friends have replied to. The strategic effect is to choke off the flow of newbies into Frost, without making it such an urgent issue that it is immediately dealt with.

21 August 2007: Infrastructure: Email server: DoS/subscribe random addresses

22 December 2007: Infrastructure: the website has been compromized

Late 2007 onwards: Ongoing DoS on Frost. Not only the ALICE bot, but also flooding most boards with large numbers of bogus, unparseable, invisible messages (around 30k-60k messages per week).