November 22, 2023 at 11:14AM
Blender, the 3D design suite, has confirmed that recent site outages were caused by ongoing DDoS attacks. The attacks started on Saturday and have severely disrupted operations. Attempts to block the attackers have been unsuccessful, with over 240 million bogus requests directed at Blender’s servers. The main website has been moved to CloudFlare to reduce the impact of the attacks. Some services and sites are still inaccessible, but users can find alternative sources like Steam and GitHub to download Blender.
According to the meeting notes, Blender has confirmed that the recent site outages were caused by ongoing DDoS attacks that started on Saturday. The attacks have rendered the project’s team unable to process legitimate connection requests, leading to severe disruptions in operations. Despite attempts to block IP ranges, the attackers quickly returned from other locations. As a result, Blender has moved its main website to CloudFlare to reduce the impact of the attacks. However, there may still be some technical issues that persist, such as accessing the site requiring a bot-filtering “challenge” for some users and certain websites associated with Blender remaining unavailable. The motives and identities of the threat actors responsible for the attacks are currently unknown. Additionally, it is advised not to download Blender from third-party sites or promoted results on Google Search, as they can lead to malware infections. Instead, a DRM-free version can be sourced from Steam or downloaded from GitHub and the Microsoft Apps Store (for Windows users).