Comment by haunter
21 hours ago
This is what I don't get
>The Aisuru DDoS botnet operates as a DDoS-for-hire service with restricted clientele; operators have reportedly implemented preventive measures to avoid attacking governmental, law enforcement, military, and other national security properties. Most observed Aisuru attacks to date appear to be related to online gaming.
https://www.netscout.com/blog/asert/asert-threat-summary-ais...
So why? Like why would someone pay to take a game down? I see this all over reddit with different games but I just don't get the point. What's the benefit of taking down an online game for a couple of hours.
Mad salt. Imagine a fully grown man having a toddler tantrum. "If I can't play/win/get my way, nobody can" type mentality. It's also a method of coercion. Give me mod status or I'll DDOS your server and destroy your community.
The other half comes from sever operators ddosing their competition. There is a lot of money to be made from paid cosmetics, ranks, moderator (demi-tyrant) status, etc on custom servers.
"Game servers" also doesn't just mean Timmy's Minecraft server. It's big commercial games.
Final Fantasy XIV keeps getting hammered, likely Aisuru, off and on since at least September.
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/6b56814...
For some scale, Final Fantasy XIV makes about $65 million in annual revenue (and decreasing).
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Also just peacocking, being that skid on the forums that took down PlayStation on Christmas will get you cred.
On my childhood I had a colleague were when him lose a match against me or my brother, him got mad and fire the joystick to the ground.
Games continue beyond the Games themselves...
What you are saying fits perfectly well in minecraft communities.
Are you mentioning the minecraft community by your message or any other gaming communities too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirai_(malware) came from Minecraft community.
>There is a lot of money to be made from paid cosmetics, ranks, moderator (demi-tyrant) status, etc on custom servers.
Anyone have any idea how much a 15 Tbps DDoS attack would cost?
Thousands of dollars? Tens of thousands?
Ballpark math says you could sustain it for half an hour on Hetzner for $5k-$6k (only from 1500 IPs though), at least if your account didn't get banned first and you're halfway decent at network programming. I have no idea what a proper botnet like this costs though or how large the profit margins are.
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I'm wagering something cheap for individual with a lot of bitcoin or crypto laying around
back in '98 i got a 100mb per download limit for $100 on my cable connection. i recall getting DoS'd by someone cause i was a lpb barstard in quake tf. They were kind though, only DoS'd me 90mb as a warning.... Years later, TF2 is getting DoS'd into oblivion, an extorhted by DDoS for hire. Some things change, some things stay the same.
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> What's the benefit of taking down an online game for a couple of hours.
Competitive MMO. Imagine some event is setup to start at some time and your guild or alliance knows they're gonna lose it and the resource it gives: DDOS the server so it's down during the event so it does not run. Enjoy the fact you kept the asset linked to said event and sell the resources you get for real money.
If you've never played those kind of games you cannot fathom how cutthroat they can become. I'm part of a guild which has a specific intelligence branch with spies embedded in many other guilds and that's playing nice because we're not selling anything.
EVE Online had to put their foot down when people were talking about what could easily be considered terrorism.
Please tell us more, I need to hear the story!
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It depends on the game, but for those with some kind of marketplace or transferable currency, I'm guessing market manipulation is one possible reason.
For other games, maybe trying to interrupt some time limited event or tournament. Going all the way down the rabbit hole, if you're not already familiar take a look at how crazy things get in a game like EVE: Online.
Then of course there are the bored trolls and/or people who feel wronged by the game's developers or other players.
Probably it has to do with all the gambling sites associated with gaming not the games itself.
Taking a competitor offline for a few hours is a lot of money in a market business I expect.
there seems to be lot of weird stuff going on with gaming casinos the recent CoffeeZilla episode comes to mind, so wouldn’t be surprised if botnets are used
They get banned for trolling, griefing, cheating, breaking rules etc. and want revenge. Every game operator has to deal with idiots like this
[flagged]
yeah bud if the person ends up ddosing I'm 100% certain their ban was justified lol
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At the end of the day, at least for silly private servers, you are always welcome to build it yourself. Theres much to learn in doing that.
the ddos market has been somewhat centered around gaming for a while now, mainly to take down game server competition, or as an attempt to sell big players on "ddos protection" services.
well, gaming and Krebs's blog: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/05/krebsonsecurity-hit-with...
Yep, Minecraft servers get DDoSed so often that Cloudflare actually offers turnkey protection for them specifically.
https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/application-services/produc...
$1 per gig overage?
I'd be using someone else's credit card for that...
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I'm surprised no one has mentioned duping. Selling items and currency for real world money is big bucks and IME, server crashes reliably enable duping exploits.
Not saying that's the case in this particular incident though.
> So why? Like why would someone pay to take a game down?
esports gambling and winning tournaments is big business.
> During the Fortnite Championship Series finals, a pair of pro players may have utilized denial of service attacks to disadvantage contesters [1]
[1] https://fortnitetracker.com/article/1087/ddos-scandal-from-c...
A game I work with got hit by ~10Tbps earlier this year. It's likely because someone got mad they were banned.
The results are very public, it's the same way IRC is often targeted. They're easy targets, thousands of users are affected and the results are immediately noticeable.
It may be for market manipulation. It may be extortion against the owning company. It may even be to take down a rival online game for a while.
I don't expect the big publisher games like PUBG to attack each other with DDoS attacks, but casino games? Or even sleazy Minecraft servers? I can totally see it.
> So why? Like why would someone pay to take a game down? I see this all over reddit with different games but I just don't get the point. What's the benefit of taking down an online game for a couple of hours.
Most of the time crime groups are running extortion campaigns, amplification campaigns, etc. For example, if a competitor can benefit from them being down you may be able to sell that. Eventually we will probably see the invention of crowd-funded randsomware, where everyone must submit one verification can of crypto to unlock the hacked game servers.
A satisfying theory for a lot of DDoS would be extortion or protection rackets. Pay up or we will DDoS you, or pay up or 'someone else' will DDoS you.
That's enough to explain it. But if you wanted to go more full shadowy conspiracy theory, someone arranged for a protection service that just so happens to work by giving some entity cleartext surveillance over much of the internet. Perhaps as a response to HTTPS everywhere being annoying.
I'm not suggesting that's the situation, but that it's the kind of possibility to keep in mind, intellectually, and it would be consistent with history.
Extortion. You got a nice little game server there. Would be a shame if anything happened to it.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, this is literally what keeps happening to me. I run a couple private MMO servers, I regularly get hit with DDoS attacks and clowns like this guy DMing me to demand money to stop attacking my servers:
https://abyss.diath.net/img/20251118055501688.png
Speculation online as to the why in this case, it's pure advertisement of their capabilities.
What is even more interesting why attack Azure? It's not possible to extort anything from Microsoft, so what's the rationale?
Misdirection. If I knock _you_ offline, its not going to be that difficult for you to put together a probable suspects list with me on it.
If it's going to cost me about the same in terms of resources to target you and a bunch of other people colocated with you, it's a bit less obvious who launched it and why.
> targeting a specific public IP address
They weren't targeting Azure itself, per se, but some service which was hosted on Azure.
The IP address in question wasn't mentioned, so we're left to speculate what this was about.
Microsoft has succumbed to extortion recently.
> It's not possible to extort anything from Microsoft
lul wut?
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-white-house-ballroom-d...
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/09/microsoft-contributes-1-mill...
It's the exact opposite of extortion. They're thrilled to spend money to buy political favor whenever possible. It's not even a drop in the bucket.
"Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon among big donors to Biden’s inauguration"
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/boeing-mi...
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> So why? Like why would someone pay to take a game down?
esports gambling is big business
Uh I used to get DDoSed by “booter” services whenever I would login to one of my Skype accounts. The script kiddie scene is that petty. In the private server scene one guy would DDoS competing servers that way everyone would funnel to his own.
Its just toxic behavior.
Gamers, am I right?
competitors might want to drive users to move away if they think a platform is broken
Depends on How much does it cost to hire it
Most of the time its just blackmail/extortion - pay us or we do the thing.
I've always imagined somebody will get pissed-off at me one day for banning them for bad behavior, or because I said something wrong online.