![]() ![]() And as Smith notes, these mass spam attacks can drive up server costs, leaving admins with unexpected bills.Īccording to reports on Mastodon, this fully automated attack was sparked by a conflict between teenagers on two different Japanese language Discord servers. Some of these servers offer open registration, making it possible to quickly start new accounts and post spam. Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko said in a post that these attacks are more difficult to moderate than past ones, because they deliberately target smaller servers, which often have fewer moderation tools in place. In a statement to TechCrunch, a Discord spokesperson said, “Discord’s Terms of Service specifically prohibit platform abuse, which refers to activities that disrupt or alter the experience of Discord users, including spam, or sending unsolicited bulk messages or interactions.” Though Discord says it is monitoring the situation, the server responsible for the spam attacks remains online. “The only common link seems to be this discord server.” “We’ve seen this costing server admins of Mastodon, Misskey, and others hundreds or thousands of dollars in infrastructure costs, and overall denial of service,” Smith wrote to Discord Trust & Safety in an email viewed by TechCrunch. She told TechCrunch that while Discord has mechanisms for reporting individual users or messages, it lacks a clear way to report whole servers. Smith attempted to contact Discord through official channels on February 17, but still has only received form responses. “They were using bots that integrated directly with Discord, such that a user didn’t even need to set up any servers or anything like that, because they could just run this bot directly from Discord in order to carry out the attack.” ![]() ![]() “The attacks were coordinated through Discord, and the software was distributed through Discord,” said Emelia Smith, a software engineer who regularly works on trust and safety issues in the fediverse, a network of decentralized social platforms built on the ActivityPub protocol. But Discord has yet to remove the server where the attacks are facilitated, and Mastodon community leaders have been unable to reach anyone at the company. Over the weekend, hackers targeted federated social networks like Mastodon to carry out ongoing spam attacks that were organized on Discord, and conducted using Discord applications. ![]()
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