Back in October, apparently there was an unusual file download traffic activity taking place on the Filebase module of our website, as evidenced by the OpenUA Standalone Package for Trial version file having been downloaded nearly 80000 times in a quick succession. This behaviour was possible since our website deliberately does not employ any rate limit system for the public file download section.
Although the nature of this incident requires further investigation at this point and it did not impact the operation of our community website in any way, it is still undesirable that the public file download options that are provided in good faith without an enforced registration process or requirement were purposefully abused in such a manner. I was personally not aware of this happening at all!
For this reason, our administration is currently considering an implementation of a third-party CDN service such as Cloudflare as the standard countermeasure and prevention layer in future. Such systems were not implemented on purpose primarily because there was no strict necessity for it until now.
The implementation of Cloudflare and perhaps other cloud networks will also provide some positive benefits such as dramatically increased file download speed from our website database servers located in Germany/Europe across the worldwide regions, especially in the geographical areas outside Europe.
Thank you for continuing to use our community platforms - and should you encounter any other issues or problems, please do not hesitate to contact us!