DDoS Attacks & What Gamers Can Do - Avast Director Speaks - Final Fantasy XIV - MMORPG.com

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DDoS Attacks & What Gamers Can Do - Avast Director Speaks - Final Fantasy XIV - MMORPG.com

Final Fantasy XIV News - Avast Director of Strategy Jonathan Penn has some great advice for Final Fantasy XIV players and for players of all online games. His comments came after the news of ongoing DDoS attacks on FFXIV: Stormblood broke across the Internet. Attacks such as these can come at the virtual hands of any number of devices connected to the online world.

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MaxBacon

I'm sorry but FF14 servers taken down like that due attacks falls on the responsibility of the companies to ensure the infrastructure can respond to this type of threats. While DDOS can't be prevented, their impact can be mitigated. Some are unreasonably easy to take down, where flood the login servers for a while and the entire game is disrupted.

Imagine if League of Legends was as vulnerable as FF14 to this type of attacks, the game would be down 24/7, it's when companies take on "cheaper" solutions they struggle this much.

Kyleran

Pretty sure hackers are all LOL players.

collekt

MaxBacon said:

I'm sorry but FF14 servers taken down like that due attacks falls on the responsibility of the companies to ensure the infrastructure can respond to this type of threats.



Imagine if League of Legends was as vulnerable as FF14 to this type of attacks, the game would be down 24/7, it's when companies take on "cheaper" solutions they struggle this much.

That's true, but what this guy is saying is also valid. You can't put blame on players for the FF servers being DDOS attacked, but you should absolutely take steps to ensure you aren't part of the problem as well.

Renoaku

This is actually a better picture for this topic .

Nah really can't blame them but I wonder who's kid decided to actually do this );.

And I was really thinking about giving the game another try just to see if I could stand it.

meonthissite

MaxBacon said:

I'm sorry but FF14 servers taken down like that due attacks falls on the responsibility of the companies to ensure the infrastructure can respond to this type of threats.



Imagine if League of Legends was as vulnerable as FF14 to this type of attacks, the game would be down 24/7, it's when companies take on "cheaper" solutions they struggle this much.

Actually it is just as vulnerable. It's the overall design of the internet and the protocols that handle network traffic. There is no company no country that is immune to them. You can make it seem like the company is at fault all you want but what happens is this, companies that are attacked spend hours trying to find the locations these attacks are coming from on the servers that still respond to their commands. If after hours of doing so they figure it out (if) then they try to redirect gameplay to backup servers that block those IPs en masse.

That's the only way it can be defended against.

meonthissite

collekt said:

MaxBacon said:

I'm sorry but FF14 servers taken down like that due attacks falls on the responsibility of the companies to ensure the infrastructure can respond to this type of threats.





Imagine if League of Legends was as vulnerable as FF14 to this type of attacks, the game would be down 24/7, it's when companies take on "cheaper" solutions they struggle this much.

That's true, but what this guy is saying is also valid. You can't put blame on players for the FF servers being DDOS attacked, but you should absolutely take steps to ensure you aren't part of the problem as well.

He's not putting blame on the players. He's saying rightfully that any device can be hijacked for this purpose and he's right.

Wellspring

Has anyone ever actually called their ISP to ask them if one of their devices is part of a DDOS botnet? Lol

Kyleran

Wellspring said:

Has anyone ever actually called their ISP to ask them if one of their devices is part of a DDOS botnet? Lol

You would think there would be a tool to check it yourself, or that your firewall/virus scanning package would cover it.

Maybe there is?

MaxBacon

meonthissite said:

Actually it is just as vulnerable. It's the overall design of the internet and the protocols that handle network traffic. There is no company no country that is immune to them. You can make it seem like the company is at fault all you want but what happens is this, companies that are attacked spend hours trying to find the locations these attacks are coming from on the servers that still respond to their commands. If after hours of doing so they figure it out (if) then they try to redirect gameplay to backup servers that block those IPs en masse.

That's the only way it can be defended against.

Not it is not. There are stronger infrastructures and setups to mitigate DDOS attacks as much as possible to prevent the chances of service disruption, as the attacks grow on scale the likeness of disruption grows but it's not any easy.

You'll see in League of Legends the DDOS attacks are targetted against the players (IPs) themselves, there's no lack of intent to disrupt the service of such a colossal game as LOL.

WoW has never suffered prolonged DDOS attacks, the way Blizzard hosts servers all over the country minimizes the impact.

Quizzical

This is one of the reasons why the "Internet of Things" is such a terrible idea.

Whatever you've got, a sufficiently large DDOS will overwhelm it.

waynejr2

collekt said:

MaxBacon said:

I'm sorry but FF14 servers taken down like that due attacks falls on the responsibility of the companies to ensure the infrastructure can respond to this type of threats.



Imagine if League of Legends was as vulnerable as FF14 to this type of attacks, the game would be down 24/7, it's when companies take on "cheaper" solutions they struggle this much.

That's true, but what this guy is saying is also valid. You can't put blame on players for the FF servers being DDOS attacked, but you should absolutely take steps to ensure you aren't part of the problem as well.

I like cheesecake is also valid.  You valid point is valid.  But is it still a bit of a cop out and inappropriate.

sayuu

MaxBacon said:

meonthissite said:

Actually it is just as vulnerable. It's the overall design of the internet and the protocols that handle network traffic. There is no company no country that is immune to them. You can make it seem like the company is at fault all you want but what happens is this, companies that are attacked spend hours trying to find the locations these attacks are coming from on the servers that still respond to their commands. If after hours of doing so they figure it out (if) then they try to redirect gameplay to backup servers that block those IPs en masse.



That's the only way it can be defended against.

Not it is not. There are stronger infrastructures and setups to mitigate DDOS attacks as much as possible to prevent the chances of service disruption, as the attacks grow on scale the likeness of disruption grows but it's not any easy.

You'll see in League of Legends the DDOS attacks are targetted against the players (IPs) themselves, there's no lack of intent to disrupt the service of such a colossal game as LOL.

WoW has never suffered prolonged DDOS attacks, the way Blizzard hosts servers all over the country minimizes the impact.

Here are the following Dates WoW's service was disrupted due to DDoS Attacks in 2016. . .

April 13-14 service troubles for most of these two days

August 3rd with some realms having service problems for over 24 hours

August 14th the attack affected all Battlenet games for over 12 hours.

August 30th A small DDoS attack for Legion's launch.

September 24, 25, 26 and 27th multiple wave like attacks to test Blizzard's newly announced defense against DDoS attacks, while services saw minimal disruptions on the 24 and 25th the defenses seemed to fail after that with major outages across battlenet for the next two days.



so yea sir or maam, you might want to do a quick google search before you make such claims as "this has never happened to this or that game company because reasons."

MaxBacon

sayuu said:

Here are the following Dates WoW's service was disrupted due to DDoS Attacks in 2016. . .

April 13-14 service troubles for most of these two days

August 3rd with some realms having service problems for over 24 hours

August 14th the attack affected all Battlenet games for over 12 hours.

August 30th A small DDoS attack for Legion's launch.

September 24, 25, 26 and 27th multiple wave like attacks to test Blizzard's newly announced defense against DDoS attacks, while services saw minimal disruptions on the 24 and 25th the defenses seemed to fail after that with major outages across battlenet for the next two days.



so yea sir or maam, you might want to do a quick google search before you make such claims as "this has never happened to this or that game company because reasons."

But the setup still works.

In one side the service is always hitting partially, the disruption is hitting in lag and disconnects over complete failure of service. So even if the attacks last long because you don't stop them, it will only partially impact the game service that will keep running.

The issue some games severely get hurt by is that they host their entire service in a datacenter and once that faces attacks, the attackers manage to take one entire game service down.

MaxBacon

DMKano said:

To mitigate volumetric DDOS it takes massive connectivity - like Google and Facebook = which is tens of millions of dollars in bandwidth and network gear alone (multiple 100Gb circuits globally)

This is simply beyond 99.9% of companies - as only carries and google/facbook/amazons of the world can afford this to where it makes sense.

LoL IS vulnerable to volumetric DDOS as is every game company.

So there are datacenters offering services where they invested millions and millions into resilient DDOS mitigation networks.

Side of that there are companies specifically offering this services, protecting entire services like Discord, so I will not agree with "vulnerable as every other company" when this services exist and are not beyond financial reach.

While nothing is completely immune, the DDOS protection is not any mirage, the login servers in many MMO's need to live to the today's reality, only a lot of players logging in at one time are enough to take them down. --'

Dagon13

waynejr2 said:

collekt said:

MaxBacon said:

I'm sorry but FF14 servers taken down like that due attacks falls on the responsibility of the companies to ensure the infrastructure can respond to this type of threats.



Imagine if League of Legends was as vulnerable as FF14 to this type of attacks, the game would be down 24/7, it's when companies take on "cheaper" solutions they struggle this much.

That's true, but what this guy is saying is also valid. You can't put blame on players for the FF servers being DDOS attacked, but you should absolutely take steps to ensure you aren't part of the problem as well.

I like cheesecake is also valid.  You valid point is valid.  But is it still a bit of a cop out and inappropriate.

How is a 3rd party rep telling players to protect themselves a cop out?

Tintagil

I wish I knew more about this stuff. It's fascinating to read all of your comments, but I have no idea who knows what they are talking about

MaxBacon

Tintagil said:

I wish I knew more about this stuff. It's fascinating to read all of your comments, but I have no idea who knows what they are talking about

Oh it's easy, let me explain:

> We play League of Legends together

> I ask to add you in Skype cause we bff's!

> I get your IP

> We start match

> I DDOS your IP

> You lag like hell

> I WIN \o/

Tintagil

MaxBacon said:

Tintagil said:

I wish I knew more about this stuff. It's fascinating to read all of your comments, but I have no idea who knows what they are talking about

Oh it's easy, let me explain:

> We play League of Legends together

> I ask to add you in Skype cause we bff's!

> I get your IP

> We start match

> I DDOS your IP

> You lag like hell

> I WIN \o/

Right, I've heard of the same thing happening in other games, for instance, has been dealing with that same issue Overwatch. I've also tried to play games that were experiencing DDOS attacks and gotten frustrated because of lag or an inability to even log in. So I've felt the pain, and am familiar with the basic concepts, but what's fascinating to me is why/how they are so disruptive, and what can be done to combat such attacks. It seems like it is a considerable challenge given the ability these attacks have to cause large scale disruption. Wasn't there a large scale DDOS (or some other hack) attack last summer (or was it two summers ago? man I'm getting old) that affected most of of the east coast in the US? I remember it was all over the news, and my internet at home and work sucked for days.

MaxBacon

Tintagil said:

Right, I've heard of the same thing happening in other games, for instance, has been dealing with that same issue Overwatch. I've also tried to play games that were experiencing DDOS attacks and gotten frustrated because of lag or an inability to even log in. So I've felt the pain, and am familiar with the basic concepts, but what's fascinating to me is why/how they are so disruptive, and what can be done to combat such attacks. It seems like it is a considerable challenge given the ability these attacks have to cause large scale disruption. Wasn't there a large scale DDOS (or some other hack) attack last summer (or was it two summers ago? man I'm getting old) that affected most of of the east coast in the US? I remember it was all over the news, and my internet at home and work sucked for days.

In LoL attack the player IPs directly has been a tactic to get leverage, Skype was used because people could get IPs of others via it.

There are unbelievable massive DDOS attacks that almost broke the internet, mostly because they found smart things to target, last year the main DNS provider in the world faced a large attack, and they only had to take that down to take a chunk of the internet down. One of the largest DDOS attacks ever recorded was one botnet of 145K security cameras.

The issue here however, is the game servers itself are being hit by DDOS attacks and this is what hits the service because it affects all the players if it is able to overwhelm something required to keep the service ongoing.

One of the biggest failure of MMO's is their login servers, not sure if you personally but many certainly have noticed that the Login Servers of MMO's can go down just because many players connect at once (remember the mess of the launch of Diablo 3?), a DDOS attack, even a small one, will be effective against them.

IceAge

MaxBacon said:

I'm sorry but FF14 servers taken down like that due attacks falls on the responsibility of the companies to ensure the infrastructure can respond to this type of threats. While DDOS can't be prevented, their impact can be mitigated. Some are unreasonably easy to take down, where flood the login servers for a while and the entire game is disrupted.


Imagine if League of Legends was as vulnerable as FF14 to this type of attacks, the game would be down 24/7, it's when companies take on "cheaper" solutions they struggle this much.

You clearly have no idea about how DDOS works. Even with a lot of "man power" , you are not "redirecting" all the DDOS. Whoever says it's DDOS free , it's lying, because if targeted by the "right guys/kids" , they will go down, no matter what.

As @DMKano said, only a bunch of companies might be save from DDOS with a very expensive "defense" , but even then, I am very sure that there is someone who can get them down. There is always a "super Dexter" , who has this very big network just for the fun of DDOSing big companies.

So yeah! Stop speaking about what you don't know. Knowing how to find a follower gamer IP , if he's somehow connected with you, by going to cmd / netstat -a ( wait .. you are not doing that because you can't read all that ) , it's not equal to knowing about the big "picture" of DDOS.

MaxBacon

IceAge said:

You clearly have no idea about how DDOS works. Even with a lot of "man power" , you are not "redirecting" all the DDOS. Whoever says it's DDOS free , it's lying, because if targeted by the "right guys/kids" , they will go down, no matter what.

As @DMKano said, only a bunch of companies might be save from DDOS with a very expensive "defense" , but even then, I am very sure that there is someone who can get them down. There is always a "super Dexter" , who has this very big network just for the fun of DDOSing big companies.

So yeah! Stop speaking about what you don't know. Knowing how to find a follower gamer IP , if he's somehow connected with you, by going to cmd / netstat -a ( wait .. you are not doing that because you can't read all that ) , it's not equal to knowing about the big "picture" of DDOS.

Oh please we all know many MMO's login servers are a mess, Diablo 3 was the prime example of how poor this stuff is done. If those servers can get overwhelmed by many players logging in at one time, all it takes is a small constant DDOS during those peak times to disrupt the entire service.

Those login servers have no defense whatsoever, once they get overwhelmed it blocks the ability to players to get into the game. What happens with or without the "boogieman" of DDoS attacks.

IceAge

MaxBacon said:

IceAge said:

You clearly have no idea about how DDOS works. Even with a lot of "man power" , you are not "redirecting" all the DDOS. Whoever says it's DDOS free , it's lying, because if targeted by the "right guys/kids" , they will go down, no matter what.

As @DMKano said, only a bunch of companies might be save from DDOS with a very expensive "defense" , but even then, I am very sure that there is someone who can get them down. There is always a "super Dexter" , who has this very big network just for the fun of DDOSing big companies.

So yeah! Stop speaking about what you don't know. Knowing how to find a follower gamer IP , if he's somehow connected with you, by going to cmd / netstat -a ( wait .. you are not doing that because you can't read all that ) , it's not equal to knowing about the big "picture" of DDOS.

Oh please we all know many MMO's login servers are a mess, Diablo 3 was the prime example of how poor this stuff is done. If those servers can get overwhelmed by many players logging in at one time, all it takes is a small constant DDOS during those peak times to disrupt the entire service.

Those login servers have no defense whatsoever, once they get overwhelmed it blocks the ability to any player to get into the game.

Thinking that DDOS protection is only the financial reach of Google, Facebook and companies of that scale... simply delusional. In fact, it's widely used by many, big and small. 

Big & Small ... they are all in the same boat. For a big company , there is a "big guy" doing the work. For a small company , it's a "little kid" doing it. Learn that, please. 

...and , you clearly have no idea about how login servers work. They need to open that very risky ports in order for you to login. Also the protection is soft, because of many factors. One which comes to my mind is letting players to insert numerous of time a invalid user/password before blocking it. Combine that when a game/expansion launch and how many tries/re-tries the login server needs to support for thousands of players simultaneous , and then actually , we might be speaking about a "self DDOS"  

So , add the DDOS guy beside the "self DDOS" ( plus other factors ) and .. we have the almighty "Login failed. Unable to connect."

But then, there is always your kind, who comes and say that the companies are cheap and "don't buy better hardware or DDOS protection" . 

IceAge

Also please note that DDOS its .. traffic = data packs, so someone needs to take that traffic. You can't block it, you take it. If you can't take it all , then everything collapse. Now it's a matter of, who have the biggest bandwidth. The attacker, or the receiver ?

Sure , you might redirect it to different servers so the data packs come more slowly to each of the servers for them to handle the traffic , but the problem remains. Who has the biggest bandwidth, wins !

MaxBacon

IceAge said:

Big & Small ... they are all in the same boat. For a big company , there is a "big guy" doing the work. For a small company , it's a "little kid" doing it. Learn that, please. 

...and , you clearly have no idea about how login servers work. They need to open that very risky ports in order for you to login. Also the protection is soft, because of many factors. One which comes to my mind is letting players to insert numerous of time a invalid user/password before blocking it. Combine that when a game/expansion launch and how many tries/re-tries the login server needs to support for thousands of players simultaneous , and then actually , we might be speaking about a "self DDOS"  

So , add the DDOS guy beside the "self DDOS" ( plus other factors ) and .. we have the almighty "Login failed. Unable to connect."

But then, there is always your kind, who comes and say that the companies are cheap and "don't buy better hardware or DDOS protection" . 

Clearly no idea... that's why they work through the same system that they do in websites, hence why the actual online games launchers / stuff are pretty much an "embed webpage" in several cases or just call the same stuff as they do through the webpage logins.

Yet the websites are doing just fine using protections like the famous Cloudflare that is accessible and has recently capable of blocking the largest DDOS attacks ever hitting their service (400GB), and were able to sustain the place under attack online.

For me, these login servers of many online games are unreasonably vulnerable and easy to overwhelm to cause service disruptions, because as it does, there's no mitigation in place.

IceAge

MaxBacon said:

IceAge said:

Big & Small ... they are all in the same boat. For a big company , there is a "big guy" doing the work. For a small company , it's a "little kid" doing it. Learn that, please. 

...and , you clearly have no idea about how login servers work. They need to open that very risky ports in order for you to login. Also the protection is soft, because of many factors. One which comes to my mind is letting players to insert numerous of time a invalid user/password before blocking it. Combine that when a game/expansion launch and how many tries/re-tries the login server needs to support for thousands of players simultaneous , and then actually , we might be speaking about a "self DDOS"  

So , add the DDOS guy beside the "self DDOS" ( plus other factors ) and .. we have the almighty "Login failed. Unable to connect."

But then, there is always your kind, who comes and say that the companies are cheap and "don't buy better hardware or DDOS protection" . 

Yet the websites are doing just fine using protections like the famous Cloudflare .

Hmmmm xD

"Cloudflare, Inc. is a U.S. company that provides a content delivery network, Internet security services and distributed domain name server services, sitting between the visitor and the Cloudflare user's hosting provider, acting as a reverse proxy for websites"

Now , comparing websites servers to .. login/gaming servers , I think it's time for me to give you a smile and .. let it be