Over the weekend, hackers targeted federated social networks like Mastodon to carry out ongoing spam attacks that were organized on Discord, and conducted
Ingress and egress costs are real and those assholes attached images to their spam. Hundreds of posts coming in at 700kb a pop does damage if you're relying on a cloud provider to store your shit. Then, it gets accessed by all your users.
I definitely have benefited as fellow admins were on top of it to the point of automated removal. That’s one of the main reasons this spam attempt is pathetic.
From the article they said smaller unattended instances were the primary target. So you might not have been one of the instances targeted, and if you don't have open registration and/or have captcha on then it wouldn't be an issue either.
They targeted smaller unattended mastodon and misskey instances... to create accounts there and post their spam all over the place including larger instances and lemmy.
Several hundred posts were removed since then.
I saw a few instances had large bills from their CDNs because some spammers uploaded many attachments. I don't think this is from the current wave of spam about the Japanese discord server though