Ubuntu Confirms Thursday's Distributed Denial of Service Attack Against Its Web Infrastructure

On Thursday those trying to access the Ubuntu website, ISO downloads, and similar Ubuntu resources on Thursday found the site "inoperable," reports Phoronix, with the disruption confirmed as a distributed denial of service attack.

"Our team is working diligently to resolve the incident," according to a Thursday post on Ubuntu Discourse — followed by a later announcement. "At this time our team continues to work on restoring affected services, most of them are now available. We appreciate your patience and understanding." Ubuntu's status page shows the Ubuntu.com outage lasting for 2 hours and 27 minutes on Friday — though with four-hour outages Wednesday (and other outages affecting other Ubuntu sites).

Today "All components are Operational," the status page reports.

Canonical's expertise is not anti-DDOS

[CommunityMember]

Canonical had a previous DDOS attack. Apparently they chose not to engage one of the various DDOS prevention services (Cloudflare is well known, but they are not the only solution provider in this space). "Fool me once, shame on you. Shame we twice, shame on me." So, shame on Canonical.

Re:

[noshellswill]

After update-induced crashes, just switched my systems from Ubuntu to Debian-13. I will not get fooled again.

Re:

[quenda]

So what you're saying is... Cloudflare was behind the attack?

Re:

[Mirnotoriety]

> Canonical had a previous DDOS attack. Apparently they chose not to engage one of the various DDOS prevention services ..

Do please enumerate how Canonical failed to engage with the various DDOS services.

Re:

[karmawarrior]

It seems to boil down to "They valued their user's privacy and so refused to use a company that funnels some ungodly portion of the Internet, decrypting and the re-encrypting it, through its servers."

Just because a "solution" to a problem exists doesn't make it appropriate or better than nothing "CommunityMember".

Just use the torrents

[Hentes]

This is why releasing on bittorrent is important, you can still get the images even if the site is down.

Re:

[bjoast]

No, thanks. I would never pirate Ubuntu!

Re:

[Hentes]

True, you don't want to encounter the Activate Linux overlay [github.com].

Re:

[HiThere]

??? What does it do? The link says how to install it, but is curiously silent on what it's for.

Re:Just use the torrents

[tlhIngan]

This is why releasing on bittorrent is important, you can still get the images even if the site is down.

Or bookmark a mirror. Many universities host such mirrors still and are great choices for those with fast connections. I know the local university hosts a huge mirror of open-source stuff, and since their internet connection is basically unlimited you can really saturate your connection downloading the ISO in a few seconds.