Addressing Recent DoS-ing Incident and Competition

Hello,

I wanted to address an ongoing incident that we are handling at AnimeThemes. This is a boring story of petty drama, but please bare with me if you can.

On 2023-02-23, we began to experience a sustained series of DoS attacks, the aim of which was to spam requests to videos and take down our service for legitimate traffic. As a result, we had reports from users that video streaming was sluggish in the region. During investigation, the originating IPs were found to be webservers from a service running in Google Cloud that advertises itself as a platform to build software without setup. It is likely that this attack was originating from a malicious script using this site as a proxy. After dropping traffic originating from this service, the attacks continued from what appeared to be local computers, hopping from exit node to exit node on a VPN service. This attacker was particularly upset with us, it seems. But after some time, the attacks stopped.

In totality, this cost us about $100-150 dollars, a 20-25% increase from our usual operational expenses. The extent of the damage is at least in part due to a lack of access to the rest of the team to respond quickly to these issues. This has since been addressed, and the team is now receiving monitoring alerts and have instructions on how to respond to future attacks of this nature. Additionally, we have added another layer of protection at the application layer to prevent malicious traffic. Since this was a mistake on my part for not having these measures in place, I will personally be covering these costs. Patrons and donators shouldn’t have to foot the bill for that. We communicated this in our latest monthly status update.

That’s not the end of the story though. While we don’t have concrete evidence, we are fairly confident of who orchestrated this attack and is using it to potentially leverage it in the launch of their competitive project. Back in September of 2022, a user joined our discord who was very vocal about AV1 and critical of our project and the quality of our videos. For context, AnimeThemes adopted VP9 years before AV1 was conceived. We have not yet adopted AV1, though we have begun looking into creating “experimental” encodes to compliment our existing encodes where won’t necessarily guarantee the same level of compatibility. Anyway, this user was clearly present in our discord to promote their project, though they would claim that this wasn’t the case. Additionally, they would be fairly toxic when the staff would respond to inquiries from our community. Our discord is a place to work collaboratively on our project. We don’t offer the space for others to attempt to funnel attention to their project, so we banned their account.

This is not to say that we don’t want or expect competition. Openings.moe existed for some time before AnimeThemes.moe was launched. There are other public collections of anime OPs and EDs like creditlessani.me of whom we try to maintain parity in our collections. We have collaborated in the past with Anime Music Quiz, who maintain their own semi-private collection of anime OPs and EDs. We have no designs on shutting down or denigrating other services. We are simply passionate about our service and providing something of value to the wider anime community.

After their ban, this user rejoined with an alt account that engaged in the same behavior as their main account. They were banned not too long after. They then sent in their friends to come troll us, which is perhaps to be expected. What this showed us, however, was that there existed an antagonism between our circles now. Sporadically, we would continue to get new users attempting to troll and post about their project. This soon quieted down until the DoS attacks. During the attacks, another mod found their discord. It became crystal clear that this community was very upset with us. They openly coordinate their trolling efforts in broad daylight. They had a pinned message of a recording of a user getting banned from our server for trolling. In general, they perceived our actions of banning them as an unprovoked slight. We were simply afraid of their service being superior to ours. We were deserving of mockery. Again, they can have those opinions. You don’t have to like us or think our project is worth anything. But we don’t owe you the space in our platforms to behave that way.

All of this being said, they do have valid criticisms of our project. We could be more efficient with our hosting costs. These are discussions we’ve had with our community as well, and this incident spurred us to begin addressing that. We anticipate cutting our costs roughly in half within the month so that we can put that money towards our source file servers or perhaps another regional cluster in Asia. In conjunction with our source file preservation effort, we obviously should be looking into newer codecs that produce the best quality videos we can for the community. I believe it is good that our decisions are being interrogated and that criticism is being voiced so that we can address it.

This is where I make a short leap of faith. While this community is very vocal in their dislike of us, there is no concrete evidence of them admitting to the DoS attacks on 2023-02-23 in the open. However, I am fairly confident in the circumstantial evidence that they are responsible. Their messaging for launch appears to be as follows:

• AnimeThemes.moe is an inferior service to ours
• AnimeThemes.moe is scamming their patrons and donators
• We can run a cheaper and better service

They can then point to the inflated operational cost of Feb 2023 that they caused to bolster this argument. I fully believe that these attacks are congruent with their behavior and with their intended messaging for bringing their product live. Again, we do not have 100% concrete proof, but I don’t feel bad about putting this accusation out there. I believe this is their plan to bring attention to their website launch.

For the record, our usage from DO transparency is derived from their billing API. I am 100% willing to share invoices with redacted personal information to anyone that would like to confirm this. All donations made to AnimeThemes.moe goes right into our DO account.

Ultimately, I am confident in our ability to deliver a better webservice than them, but I don’t wish them any ill-will. I am simply frustrated that another project is intending on using these methods to bring attention to themselves, and I wanted to share this ahead of their launch if only to explain things from our side before they can proceed with this narrative. My hope here is that their community has enough faith in the quality of their product that they don’t feel the need to root their identity in an antagonism of a competitive project. These are hobbyist projects that are meant to give something of value to the community where we encourage collaboration above all else.

In the meantime, this has made me all the more motivated in my own work. I have adopted weekly sprints for myself to quickly get everything in place for our playlist effort. We are excited to share this soon with our community and to continue building AnimeThemes.moe into a better and better webservice. Thank you to everyone that has shown an interest in or contributed to AnimeThemes.moe.

Finally, I wish miu.to the best of luck with their website launch.

• para