Drama Ponies

We resume our tale from before. It's now April 28th, 2020. Exactly two weeks to the day the attacks started, I discover a wild array of connections to a previously unconsidered individual. Background information and DDoS postmortem to wrap up our miniature saga.

We resume our tale from before. April 12th, 2020. I've just discovered that the source of the server issues we've been having over the past two days were being caused by an unknown attacker with no declared motive.

Four days before the one-year anniversary of the first public opening of BronyTales, we experienced our first DDoS attack. Not just any random attack, though - someone with experience bypassing the specific DDoS protection system I had purchased. A mysterious nemesis, no motives or suspects, a server on fire, untraceable weapons, and one question through it all: when will the server be fixed?

A story about server administration, community management, computer forensics, and a touch of noir. These are the tales of Data, the sysadmin P.I.

At BronyTales, we’ve always had an anti-drama policy. Unfortunately, no community is immune to bouts of drama of all flavors, and we have certainly had our fair share. I’ve personally had to deal with more drama cases in the past year than I’d ever had to deal with in my nine years of brony fandom. Unfortunately, it seems that by avoiding spreading the details of drama as to not encourage gossip I have unintentionally made things worse. By not speaking out, I’ve permitted those looking to tear people down to tell their own version of events uncontested.

And so I am taking some steps to document for everyone some of the more recent and larger-affecting cases, starting with an issue central to one of our larger sub-communities: art base theft.