Hate attacks on Codeberg

[sunrat]

I have an account and contributed a tiny bit of code to rtcqs project a while ago. Yesterday I received an unpleasant email notification from there. Codeberg is under attack. Today they emailed an explanation and link to a blog article: https://blog.codeberg.org/we-stay-strong-against-hate-and-hatred.html

There are some sad excuses for humans in this world.
Here's the first part of the blog which contains the main message:
 

Quote

We stay strong against hate and hatred
Codeberg public relations team
Wed 12 February 2025
Category: Announcement
Codeberg is currently suffering from hate campaigns due to far-right forces, and so are our users. First and foremost, we apologize for everyone who has recently received a notification email from our system containing offending and potentially traumatizing content. We are working hard on containing the effects on our users and systems.
Most importantly, your private data was not leaked. All emails have been generated through Codeberg's servers using the notification feature and the abusers had no access to your email address directly.
Fighting hate and far-right forces is important to us. Read to the end of this article to learn why.
What has happened?
In the past days, several projects advocating tolerance and equal rights on Codeberg have been subject to hate attacks, such as massive spam of abusive messages in their issue trackers. We have been monitoring the situation closely and have tried to clean up the content as quickly as possible.
Often, content remained available only for a few and up to 30 minutes. Due to constrained personal capacities, some rare cases have remained online for longer. We appreciate all your reports to abuse@codeberg.org that help us identify abuse quickly.
On 12 February 2025, an abuser has escalated the attacks to a next level. Instead of targetting individual projects, they have started to create abusive content and mentioned Codeberg users in chunks of 100 each. Depending on the notification settings of users (if you are a user on Codeberg, you can modify it in your settings), these generate notification emails that contain a copy of the post that includes the mention - and thus the abusive content via email.
Although our staff reacted quickly, blocked access to the used functionality and deleted the user accounts, they managed to generate a large amount of notification emails already.
Since this attack is not only harming Codeberg users but the platform itself, both via technical means (we had brief downtime of our systems and our mail server was suffering a lot), as well as by harming the reputation of our platform and trust users have shown us. We expect this incident to be in response to our swift moderation of the previous campaigns that targeted only individual projects.
How could this happen?
Please understand that Codeberg.org is driven by volunteers mostly. We have sufficient capacity to run the platform under normal conditions, and normal conditions also include some headway to deal with abuse campaigns that come and go. We suppose that most readers did not notice the spam campaigns of the past days, and we are happy that we managed to contain them quickly. We are fighting with advertisement spam, phishing and malware week to week.
However, our capacity was obviously exhausted this time, when it comes to attacks that target us specifically. And we apologize for this.

 

[securitybreach]

So where is the hate group part? They mention right wing but show no proof of any kind of activity. People do not realize that a massive amount of "people" online are just bots. Also, what does this have to do with Linux. No offense, just curious.

 

I do not know the whole story but I am sure its just a troll messing with them and not a full blown attack. You have to have a good reason to attack someone, not just because they said something you do not agree with it. Trolls do that, not attackers. And like mentioned, its mostly just bots anyway. That's why you leave your personal politics out of projects. Look at what happened with Freenode, went from the one of the largest IRC servers on the planet to a ghost town pretty much overnight because they brought in their ideology.

 

Open source and Linux are all about openness, not any ideology. People on a whole disagree about things so it never works out if you bring personal thoughts into projects.

[sunrat]

I'm not going to post the email I received. It was hateful and racist.

[securitybreach]

6 minutes ago, sunrat said:

I'm not going to post the email I received. It was hateful and racist.

 

Yeah, then probably a bot. There is a lot of that going on nowadays.

[crp]

There have been a couple of distros that have gone full-on political. 

unfortunate, but there are plenty on distros out there that don't care about politics.