Hi all, I am writing a comment to summarize the work done and to formally close out the Fedora Council ticket tracking this issue. This comment will be written and posted both on the Fedora Discussion topic and the Fedora Council Pagure issue.
Since June to September, when this issue was in especially high focus, we have adopted several new mechanisms to protect our community from these attacks and make our infrastructure more resilient to malicious attacks such as these.
This is a brief summary of the steps we have taken over the past few months to address this issue:
- Worked with our hosting provider, Element Matrix Services (EMS), to roll out experimental new features for users on
:fedora.imaccounts to block room invites from users not also on the:fedora.imserver - Adopted a new moderation bot (Draupnir) with the amazing help of @rorysys and others from the wider Matrix moderation community for Linux distros
- Worked with our hosting provider to raise this issue with the appropriate authorities
- Created new public and private Matrix Working Group rooms for moderators and the wider Fedora community to coordinate and respond to attacks quickly in real-time when they happen
Since these actions were taken, the reports of this content have mostly disappeared. The few reports we still see are from users who have not logged into their Matrix accounts for some time, and therefore, still have the room invites pending. The best way to resolve this issue is by taking the following step on the Element Matrix client:
- Go to Settings → Help & About → click “Clear cache and reload”
We encourage anyone who sees harmful content to make a report to the Fedora Matrix WG in #wg-matrix:fedoraproject.org.
Closing/locking this topic. A sincere and heartfelt thanks to the several people who dropped a lot of other important things and gave this an urgent priority. We could not have responded in the coordinated way we did without the help of lots of amazing people in our community who are committed to the safety and well-being of our Fedora community. 