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Open-source Blender project battling DDoS attacks since Saturday. Blender has confirmed that recent site outages have been caused by ongoing DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks that started on Saturday. Blender is a popular 3D design suite for creating animated films, video games, motion graphics, visual effects, soft body and particle simulation, and many more. The project's team says the attacks started over the weekend, rendering them unable to process legitimate connection requests, causing a severe disruption to operations. "Since last Saturday, 18 November, the blender.org servers are under a DDoS attack; bringing down our servers by overloading them with requests," reads the announcement. "The administrators have been working on it non-stop. Attempts to block IP ranges from attackers did not work, as they quickly came back from other locations." Even in the short periods during which the attackers paused the attacks, Blender's infrastructure remained overloaded by large volumes of pending legitimate requests, making it hard for their servers to catch up. Eventually, after four days of continual problems, the team moved its main website to CloudFlare today, which they say helped reduce the impact of the attacks. Stats shared by Blender's COO, Francesco Siddi, on X, show that the attacks are ongoing, counting over 240 million bogus requests directed at the project's servers. Blender warns that the following problems may persist when attempting to use their services and sites: The threat actors responsible for the attacks on Blender and their motives are currently unknown. In case disruptions return in the next couple of days, it is important to note that downloading Blender from third-party sites or promoted results on Google Search can lead to malware infections. If you're looking to get a Blender installer and the official site is down, you may always source a DRM-free version from Steam, which doesn't require Valve's client to run. Blender is also available through GitHub, while Windows users can also get it directly from the Microsoft Apps Store.

Daily Brief Summary

DDOS // Blender Suffers Persistent DDoS Attacks, Disrupting Operations

The Blender project has been experiencing ongoing DDoS attacks since Saturday, causing significant site outages and service disruptions.

As a widely-used open-source 3D design suite, Blender's inability to process legitimate requests has severely impacted creators relying on their services.

Blender's team has been actively combating the attacks, but efforts to block the attackers' IP ranges were futile as they rapidly shifted to new locations.

In response to the continual issues, the team moved Blender's main website to CloudFlare, effectively reducing the severity of the attack's impact.

Over 240 million fake requests have been launched against Blender's servers, as reported by the company's COO, Francesco Siddi.

While the identity and motives of the perpetrators behind the DDoS attacks remain unknown, the risks, including potential service interruptions and malware infections from unofficial downloads, are still present for users.