Spam attack on Twitter/X rival Mastodon highlights 'fediverse' vulnerabilities

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Over the past several days, attackers have targeted smaller Mastodon servers, taking advantage of open registrations to automate the creation of spam accounts.

While this is not the first spam attack that has impacted the Fediverse, Rochko notes that only larger servers like Mastodon.social had been targeted previously.

What’s different this time is that the spammers targeted the smaller and even abandoned servers offering open registration, allowing the bad actors to quickly create accounts and generate spam.

Because Mastodon’s smaller servers are often hobbyist projects run by enthusiasts they were vulnerable to this sort of attack.

Many servers were simply shut off as their admins decided it would be easiest to wait out the attack or abandon Mastodon altogether.

“At the moment, there are no good built-in tools to handle this, as this is a complex issue — federated networks are not easy!

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