Person holding an iPhone with Discord Open
Hannah Stryker / How-To Geek

Nuking means rendering a Discord server unusable. Discord servers could be nuked manually by a consumer with sufficient permissions or utilizing a bot to trigger widespread harm shortly. Shield towards this by being cautious in assigning employees roles, including safety bots, and backing up your server.

When you’re a Discord consumer you’ll have heard the time period “nuking” used to explain a server assault. So what precisely does this imply, how does it occur, and what are you able to do about it in the event you’re a server admin?

What’s Discord Server Nuking?

Discord server nuking primarily means destroying the server. That is achieved by deleting, banning, and modifying server settings to trigger as a lot harm as potential. The last word objective is to render the server unusable, therefore the time period “nuke.”

Nuking is just like raiding, with a typically extra extreme outcome. Raiding means subjecting a Discord server to an inflow of customers (each human and bot) to harass, spam, and trigger bother. Nuking goes a step additional by making an attempt to destroy the server completely.

The time period “nuking” isn’t particular to Discord and has an extended historical past on the web, significantly in gaming circles. For instance, nuking in Minecraft would typically contain destroying all consumer creations on a server.

How Attackers Use Nuke Bots to Take Down Discord Servers

Attackers might try to nuke a Discord server both manually or utilizing bots which are designed to trigger as a lot harm as potential. Earlier than a server could be broken past restore, the attacker should achieve the privileges required to wreak havoc. This typically entails social engineering their means up the ladder to achieve sufficient belief to be given a place of energy.

Alternatively, an attacker might achieve management of an account that has enough privileges to trigger issues in the identical means a Fb or e-mail account could also be compromised.

Creating a moderator role in Discord with server management permissions

Nuking could be carried out manually by altering settings inside Discord to start out inflicting issues for the server proprietor. Alternatively, numerous bots are designed to trigger as a lot harm in as little time as potential. Bots are typically favored since they’ll carry out these actions far faster, although they’re typically simpler to detect.

The type of harm attributable to a nuking assault might embrace banning customers, deleting channels, creating channels, spamming, demoting employees members, deleting roles, deauthorizing bots, and disseminating content material that’s towards the Discord phrases of use (adopted by mass-reporting).

Defending Your self Towards Discord Server Nuking

When you own a Discord server, the very best protection towards a nuke assault is doing due diligence when handing out employees roles. Be extremely cautious who you enable into admin or moderator roles on your server. Not solely must you belief the particular person, however you also needs to ensure that they’ve taken precautions to guard their account.

Beneath Server Settings > Security Setup you possibly can allow “Require 2FA for moderator actions” which implies that moderators should have two-factor authentication setup on their account to entry ban, kick, timeout, and delete capabilities. This makes it tougher for bots to entry these capabilities. Because the channel proprietor, you also needs to have two-factor authentication enabled on your Discord account.

Require 2FA for moderator actions

It’s also possible to add bots to your server that may assist detect and shut down nuke makes an attempt. Bots like Wick and Security Bot have nuke detection that may shortly shut down nuke makes an attempt so long as the attacker doesn’t disable them first.

It’s also possible to create backups of your server utilizing bots like Xenon and ChannelBot, which lets you restore roles, channels, emoji, permissions, messages, and extra within the occasion of a profitable nuke assault.

On prime of this, you possibly can make use of most of the best defenses against Discord raids and techniques used to prevent Discord spam to assist mitigate assaults in your server.

Server Nuked? Report it to Discord

Relying on how the nuke occurred, you might be able to attain out to Discord support for assist. Assaults like raiding and nuking are towards the Discord phrases of service, so you could at the very least have the ability to deliver the attacker to justice. If the assault was attributable to your account being compromised, you may also report that.

Don’t be postpone by Discord nukes and different assaults. There are dangerous actors on each nook of the web, however Discord can be a valuable tool for group chats, and even rivals Slack or Teams for non-gaming purposes.


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