DDoS attacks on Arch Linux: situation probably clarified
Over the past few days, Arch Linux has experienced website and service outages due to DDoS attacks. This now seems to be over.
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Arch Linux is a popular and lightweight Linux distribution with rolling releases. The project's servers were partially unavailable in the past few days because they were overloaded by distributed denial-of-service attacks. The problem now seems to have been solved.
On the Arch Linux service status page, the situation looks bad at first glance. However, the status already displays the warning colors in bright red when less than 95 percent of the calls are successful. In some cases, the countermeasures taken by the project meant that the status system itself could not access the services. The outages were therefore not nearly as serious as the status suggests.
Nevertheless, the Arch Linux project has also commented on the attacks. According to this, the main website in particular was under attack, but also the Arch User Repository (AUR) and the forums. Together with the hosting provider, the project has been working on countermeasures. The maintainers have also evaluated anti-DDoS service providers, assessing them in terms of cost, security and ethical standards. As the project is run by volunteers, they ask for patience and thank the users who have been patient so far.
Availability of ISOs and packages
If the main page is not accessible, there are mirrors available for the packages and sources in the pacman-mirrorlist, the maintainers explain. For the ISO images, there are mirrors on the geomirrors list. The packages in the Arch User Repository (AUR) – which is not the distribution repository and also not a package source in Arch, but contains package descriptions provided by users to compile software from source code – have been mirrored by the project on Github.
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The Arch Linux maintainers have not yet commented on the details of the attacks, but wanted to keep information on the origin and countermeasures internal for the time being, as long as the attacks continue. The project may comment on this in the near future, and we will update the report here.
In June, Cloudflare reported a record DDoS attack with 7.3Â TBit/s. However, the strength of the DDoS attacks on the Arch sites is still unknown. However, they are likely to be well below this value.
(dmk)
