Yes I agree, the attack is real. I have a blog and I build websites. No matter how small a website is, it's visited regularly by hackers, spammers, etc.
That is a valid point. I know someone who has a home server that is constantly attacked by bots trying to do a brute force login on his machine.
Although the article posted is somewhat out of date only references humans that are up to no good. Some of the disruptive behavior probably has been outsourced to chat bots that don’t have to be paid. I’ve encountered some chat bots in irc that seemed to scan the words and respond with something related to the conversation. The result was incoherent babbling when I engaged them.
As for all the hacking and spamming and denial of service attacks those are a natural progression of a desire to disrupt things. That delves into the realm of cyber security which is also an interesting topic.
One of objectives of these things attacking your website could very well be a less free locked down internet. {look at all these cyber criminals running amok let’s require facial recognition to access internet!}
I often think about how things could be better designed to stop malicious people on internet. Some people just resort to banning large ranges of ip addresses but there has to be a better solution. The internet of things with all sorts of unsecured devices that shouldn’t have been connected to internet is only making things worse.
But it is not wise to publicize the knowledge how they can or how can we minimize the threat. Because that only will educate them. Now the newbies can level up become more skilled attackers.
That would be a valid sentiment if we were dealing with bored teenage pranksters. However I believe the people doing this to be paid professionals who have already mastered these techniques and probably more. We are playing catch-up at best. I learned a few things myself from that article.
There is a whole new profession of social influencer on the Internet. They go to every platform they can get to including irc. They use multiple accounts and vpns. Libera is full of all sorts of strange accounts created at server launch which I doubt are people who have anything to do with the opensource community. They try to promote all the latest Offensive strange ideas of politics and reality. I’ll let you fill in the blanks..
As I’ve said before there are powerful interests that want to get people off irc and onto more profitable platforms with ad revenue and surveillance capitalism.
We have to come to terms with the fact that people exist who for whatever reason do not want there to be this open source project and keep trying to be disruptive.