Anti Nuke: What Happens When an Admin Account Gets Taken Over

There are two ways to destroy a Discord server, and they need completely different defenses.

In a raid, many outside accounts arrive at once and spam. Verification, account age checks and a honeypot help against that, everything that sits at the entrance.

A nuke is the opposite: somebody who already has permissions deletes channels, deletes roles, bans members. That might be a compromised admin account, a bot with too many permissions, or a staff member leaving on bad terms. The entrance does not help here, the attack comes from inside.

Why fixed rules are not enough

The obvious approach would be a hard limit: anyone deleting more than five channels in a minute gets removed.

The problem is that the same action means completely different things depending on context. The server owner deleting ten old channels during a cleanup is doing something harmless. An account created yesterday, granted admin today and now deleting channels is doing something else entirely, even though the action looks identical.

Anti Nuke therefore works with a weighted threat score rather than fixed thresholds. The assessment takes in, among other things:

• How dangerous the granted role is
• How old the account is
• Whether the same account has already drawn attention on other AlphaCloud servers, if network-wide reporting is switched on

That produces an assessment, and only then does a response follow.

People and bots are handled separately

Responses can be configured completely separately for users and for bots, and that is not a detail.

A bot deleting channels never does so by accident. Either it was built for it or it was compromised. In both cases the immediate hard response is the right one.

A human, on the other hand, can make a mistake. That is why starting users on the milder step makes sense: quarantine rather than ban. Quarantine takes permissions away without removing the person, which leaves room for a conversation. Quarantine, kick and ban are available.

On top of that there is a bot whitelist for the bots you deliberately trust, and an option to immediately remove any newly added bot. The latter sounds drastic, but it is exactly the gap many nukes run through: somebody with "add bot" invites a prepared one.

Auto Revert and emergency lockdown

Two functions take over once something has already happened.

Auto Revert restores deleted channels and roles automatically. That is valuable, but it comes with an honest limitation: what is restored is the structure, not the content. A channel comes back, the messages in it do not. Discord does not hand deleted messages back, to anyone.

Emergency lockdown freezes the server instead of chasing individual actions. Useful when it is unclear how many accounts are involved: stop the damage, then clean up calmly.

Network-wide reporting

Optionally your server can share threat reports with other AlphaCloud servers. The idea: somebody who attempted a nuke on one server often tries the next one.

This is deliberately a decision you make rather than a default. Turning it on contributes to shared detection and benefits from it.

What Anti Nuke cannot do

Three things deserve to be said plainly:

Deleted messages are gone. See above. If you want to preserve content, you need a server backup, and that too saves structure, not messages.

The bot needs permissions to act. Without "Manage Roles" it cannot quarantine anybody. This happened in practice, and it was solved by sending the owner and every administrator one DM per hour naming the cause, instead of flooding the error log. But the actual fix is granting the permission.

There is no technical protection against the server owner. Discord gives the owner every permission, and no bot can change that.

A sensible setup order

Anti Nuke is the second layer, not the first. The order that works:

1. Clean up permissions. Who really needs "Manage Channels"? Usually fewer people than you think.
2. Turn on Anti Nuke, start users on quarantine, go harder on bots.
3. Set a log channel and actually read it for the first few weeks.
4. Only then tune the thresholds.

Details on every setting are in the Anti Nuke documentation.