Comment by reggieband
4 years ago
I worked on a mid-sized online game a few years ago and we experienced several DDoS attacks. I recall one employee tracking down the specific botnet that was rented for the attack against us and we calculated the attacker probably spent a couple of hundred dollars based on the rates.
IIRC, we eventually used AWS Elastic Load Balancer to just soak up the attack, which was a pretty basic SYN flood. Then we waited the attacker out until he got sick of spending money. That temporary redirect definitely impacted performance and cost us some money but it pretty well mitigated the issue. We also spent a bit of time optimizing our servers to drop obvious nonsense requests as quickly as possible but in the end the ELB handled most of the issue for us.
Fascinating that there are people out there with disposable income for the sole purpose of griefing someone’s project/product.
I think it can be cheaper to initiate these types of attacks than to defend against them. Just pissing someone off with an extra $20 to spend can give you a bad day
Offense in cheaper than defense even in non internet related situations, hence societies with high levels of trust between its members are able to advance more quickly due to not needing to waste so many resources on defense.
1 reply →
Real life amplification attack, eh?
Well damn. The more you know.
):
I doubt it's their income they're spending.
I don't know about gp's particulars, but over the years I'm pretty sure I've seen competitors do this on strategic dates to impact the userbase game perception.
If it's an online game, people might do it to boot other people out of the game, especially enemy groups. Kind of as a joke.
Or so I've heard
Out of curiosity as well as sheer ignorance; isn't AWS Shield designed to help with DDoS? was it more complex or expensive or not applicable?
Why was no attempt at legal action taken?
They mention attempting it in the post. It didn't go anywhere one time, as it was a minor, and the other they don't have anything to tie the attack to a person. This is a pretty common problem for small games/services that experience outsized problems like this. It's incredibly time consuming to deal with and legal action typically costs money. If you want to go after someone and you think you know who it is you need a lawyer and you need to get a case into discovery so you can get a lawyer subpoena power to contact ISPs and such. Even if you have their real IP-- reporting to police, or ISP can result in no action, even if you put in a lot of work.
Also CHINA does this to all NON-CHINA games. Think about why gaming and crypto-currency is banned now. It's because they are weaponizing their hacks and bullshit in gaming so that you either have to play their game and basically be hacked. Or give up playing your game all together. If anyone has questions about this please consult any recent hardcore PVP game.