What’s a DDoS attack?

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to make a service, server, website unavailable by sending a lot of requests to it. They basically overwhelm the service with traffic from multiple places. The hosting will fail in this case and the service will be down for a certain amount of time. The cost for a week-long DDoS is around $150 in the black market and more than 2000 DDoS attacks are observed daily. DDoS attacks are divided into 3 parts:

Volumetric attacks – A lot of traffic is being sent to a target. As the data line have a limited capacity, the target will fail and the service won’t be available.

TCP Attacks – The attacker search for vacant available connection slots to consume all the memory and available resources on the machine that host the service. This is something easy to solve to a ddos protection company, but not by an average IT person.

Application Attacks – The most dangerous DDoS attacks are the application attacks. These are highly destructive but it also require a deeper knowledge from the attacker. This type can only be used by working with a few packets and only if the target application have flaws in their code.

Are Games Affected by DDoS Attacks?

Games can be affected by DDoS attacks too. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey suffered a major DDoS attack at its launch. This was highly unfortunate for the fans of this game – but the issue was solved in less time than expected. Most people believe that the reason for the attack was the microtransactions that made Ubisoft among the most hated gaming companies in 2019.

Another major gaming DDoS attack was on the Valve’s $18 Million Dota 2 tournament. The contest was delayed by a few hours due to a major DDoS attack that slammed the game’s servers. This cost the company a lot of money and even more – their image. Valve suffered a major PR hit after the failed Dota 2 tournament.

Xbox was also a victim of DDoS attacks in the past. Most of the US and CA players reported they were unable to connect to Xbox live. The company declared that they were under a DDoS attack and everything was settled under 24 hours.

World of Warcraft: Warlord of Draenor suffered a DDoS upon its launch. The issue was solved in the shortest time possible, but it also affected the company’s reputation na bit. The company create a queue for the players who got disconnected to connect back in. But even like this, the DDoS attack continued and the NA realm had to be paused for 4 hours to regain its stability.

Conclusion

Are DDoS attacks still dangerous in 2019? Yes. It doesnt matter if you’re a huge company with a lot of servers, a DDoS attack can occur at any time. Therefore, any gaming company, service, website and so on should hire a professional team to set up a proper DDoS mitigation shield for DDoS attack and tools to monitor the traffic and the data at any time.

 

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