Raising Awareness of "FifthColumnMC Disconnected"
If you are a server owner and ever get this message, this is what it means and what to do!
The account FifthColumnMC is associated with a group of greifers that use bots to scan servers in an attempt to find unprotected ones.
If you get the message "FifthColumnMC (ip adress) lost connection: disconnected" that means they attempted to join. To clarify because I saw some posts about this that were confused, the term disconnected implies that they were able to connect, but that is not what that means!!!
How their server scanning bot works! This bot will attempt to join a server for a fraction of a second to collect surface level data. The main data that they look for are if your server has a whitelist, anti-cheat, and if it has a propper backup system. If your server does not have any of these things, you fit their qualifications.
Even if you have a small free server without anti-cheat plugins or an automatic backup, you can still enable a whitelist to keep them out! The process of enabling a whitelist is incredibly simple and can be done by an operator in game or in console.
Ive had a few disconnected messages pop up from the, but thankfully I do have whitelist, anti-cheat, and auto backups that I manually download. I was irritated by how frequently they attempted to join my server so I banned their user, which unfortunately seems to have spured them on so maybe don't do that. (you wont be able to IP ban they, they join with different IPs each time)
If you want to learn a bit more about it, this youtube video goes into more detail about these idiots
Anyway, come point and laugh at these losers that take joy in destroying peoples worlds:
Posted Mar 8, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC