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How to protect a Discord server from nukes

By ESN Systems, makers of ESN Guardian. Updated November 2, 2026.

Getting nuked is one of the worst things that can happen to a community: channels gone, roles wiped, members banned, years of setup lost in a minute. The good news is that almost every nuke follows the same pattern, and a handful of settings shut most of them down. This guide goes from the built-in Discord settings everyone should change to the tools that let you recover in seconds.

🛡️ Not sure how safe your server is? Grade it in 2 minutes →

1. Understand where nukes come from

A nuke needs permissions. Outsiders cannot delete your channels; only accounts and bots with Manage Channels, Manage Roles, Ban Members or Administrator can. So nukes come from three places: a staff member who turns on you, a staff account that gets phished or has its token stolen, and a bot whose token leaks or that was malicious from the start. Every step below shrinks one of those three.

2. Cut Administrator down to the minimum

Administrator overrides every other permission and every channel lock. Open Server Settings → Roles and check which roles have it. Most servers need it on the owner and maybe one or two co-owners, nobody else. Moderators can do their job with Kick, Ban, Timeout and Manage Messages. The fewer accounts that can delete everything, the fewer accounts an attacker can use.

Do the same for bots. A music bot or a leveling bot does not need Administrator. Remove it, and give each bot only what it uses.

3. Fix your role order

Discord roles can only manage roles below them. Put your owner and admin roles at the top, then your security bot's role, then everything else. If a bot or staff role sits higher than it needs to, it can edit or delete the roles of people above it in importance.

4. Require 2FA for moderators

In Server Settings → Safety Setup, turn on "Require 2FA for moderator actions". Staff without two-factor authentication on their accounts then cannot ban, kick or delete. It is one of the strongest single protections against a phished mod account being used to nuke, and only the server owner can switch it on.

5. Watch out for the common phishing tricks

Most staff accounts are stolen, not hacked. Teach your team the three tricks that keep working: fake "verify your account" bots that ask you to scan a QR code (scanning it logs the attacker in as you), fake Discord Nitro or giveaway links, and "can you test my game" downloads that steal your login token. Discord staff will never DM you asking for a code or a QR scan.

6. Be careful with webhooks and new bots

Manage Webhooks lets someone create webhooks that can spam every channel, and webhooks are a favourite nuke tool. Limit that permission to one or two roles. Before adding any bot, check who makes it and what permissions it asks for, and remove bots you no longer use.

7. Add an anti-nuke bot

Even with perfect permissions, a trusted account can still go bad, and humans are too slow to stop a script that deletes 50 channels in ten seconds. An anti-nuke bot watches for bursts of destructive actions and stops them automatically. ESN Guardian watches deletes, mass bans and kicks, webhook creation, bot adds and permission changes, removes the attacker's roles the moment a limit is crossed, and catches trusted bots that suddenly behave strangely with Sentry. Your owner and trusted staff are never punished by its automatic protection.

8. Keep backups so you can recover

Assume something will get through one day and make recovery cheap. Guardian keeps snapshots of your server's structure; /rewind and the one-click undo bring back deleted channels and roles with their permissions. Take a snapshot with /snapshot take after any big reorganisation so the latest layout is saved.

9. Check your score and practise

Run /audit report in Guardian for a security grade. It checks things like how many people have Administrator, whether moderators need 2FA and where Guardian sits in the role list, and tells you what each fix is worth. /hardening drill tests your setup safely, so you find out it works before an attacker does.

If you are being nuked right now

• Remove the attacking account's roles, or ban it, from a phone if you have to.
• Kick any bot you do not recognise and any bot that is doing the damage.
• Pause invites (Server Settings → Safety Setup) to stop a raid on top of the nuke.
• Change the password of any staff account involved, and reset the token of any bot involved in the Discord Developer Portal.
• Restore: with Guardian, use /rewind or the undo button on the log entry.

Which bots help

Swipe the table sideways to see every bot →

✓ = listed · 💎 = paid tier only · — = not listed on their public pages. Checked Nov 2, 2026. Wick: Wick docs and Wick Premium ⁴ (anti-raid and backups are listed as Premium). RaidProtect: raidprotect.bot and docs. Dyno: FAQ ² (points to its Automod module for anti-nuke/anti-raid) and Premium ³ (billed $49.99/year). NightWatch and Strafe have no public website or docs, so their columns come from their public Discord bot profiles, NightWatch's slash-command list and the log posts each bot made while it ran in our own server. Features change on every bot, so test on a spare server before you switch.

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