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We used to run a game server for a small community of around 400-500 people and DDos attacks were something we had to face almost every week, whenever someone g

We used to run a game server for a small community of around 400-500 people and DDos attacks were something we had to face almost every week, whenever someone got upset with the admin team, the go to solution was was to DDos, you get scammed by another player? DDos. Got banned for saying racist things ingame? DDos. You figured out a new way to cheat in game and the admins fixed it? DDos. We were kids back then and those were kids that were attacking us with just a 5-10usd budget. Yes they were relatively small (ranging from 10-60Gbps) attacks compared to the Tbps attacks that are happening to some companies, but good god it was so annoying when all it took was just 5 usd from some idiot to take down your server. We moved to gcp got null routed (or reduced network bandwitch to the node under attack) every-time there was an attack. Bought azure's 3000usd a month anti DDos protection, was worthless for a tcp/udp service. Tried to have a network load balancer in the cloud that auto-scaled, still some players got effected when an attack came in. Finally we moved over to OVH and placed a few really powerful servers in-front of the game server and applied some ipfilter rules to reduce common attacks. That ended up being the cheapest option out of all the options. When you have a very small community its not like you have the biggest budget to work with. But it was really fun and taught all of us a lot. Looking back its kinna sad we had to end things. But it was a lot fun. DDos attacks are one of those things that really makes me worried about the future of the internet. The only way to win it is to throw money at it and cross your fingers that the attacker will run out of resources before you do. Definitely companies like cloudflare does an incredibly good job of stopping some insanely big attacks when it comes to http/https (I recently saw they were supporting udp and tcp based services now, never tried it). But one thing that's weird is having to rely on some 3rd party company. Yes cloudflare so far has been a company I can trust, but, I once loved and trusted a company that said "Don't be evil". If you are a developer for some IOT device manufacturer please do your best to makesure someone wont turn your light bulb in to a part of a botnet. When you guys fuck-up the rest of us have to suffer.

EGreg 6y ago
And this is why we need MaidSAFE instead of the Web. They don’t have DDOS attacks, instead you make money every time someone accesses a chunk of a resource, and the kademlia tree hides the hosts’ IP after one hop so the network and hosts can’t be taken down easily. Very different from Tor. https://maidsafe.net https://maidsafe.net is the best project to come out of the “Web3” space. If you heard of freenet, this is like freenet 2.0 PS: Why the massive silent downvotes? This platform actually solves the problem and many others HN constantly correctly complain about. But when posted, you prefer to ignore it. (Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with them in any way. In some ways they are a competitor to Qbix and Intercoin but I give credit where it is due.)
- gilrain 6y ago
  I think a lot of us are tired of cryptocurrency snake oil. It is an uphill battle to build things on a cryptocurrency and try to convince the wise that it isn't an elaborate vehicle for get-rich-quick speculation.
  - EGreg 6y ago
    MaidSAFE is not a cryptocurrency. It’s a network closer to Tor and Freenet but architected way better. This is like downvoting all mentions of IPFS because FileCoin is a currency that is used to pay others for storing files. Or like downvoting all mentions of Freenet.
    - gilrain 6y ago
      > MaidSAFE is not a cryptocurrency Mmhm. Well, they raised money using an ICO, so apparently they felt their coin was worth people speculating on. Market cap is above $200 million. Maybe the technology is great, but it's built and operates like any other get-rich-quick crypto scheme. Their mission, if genuine, would be better served by a different approach. Avoid the appearance of impropriety and all that. I don't have much of an opinion and don't want to argue, but you did ask why people were downvoting. That's why.
      - piluso 6y ago
        I am Lolling at the "get-rich-quick scheme" criticism of yours. This project has been in development for 14 years. It is incredible that people don't even care to properly research it, and they blindly choose their favourite bias just to say something. On one side we have those who criticize for not being soon enough, and other for being a 14 years get-rich-quick-scheme. Fabulous. I would invite you to check out what the project is really about, check out: https://primer.safenetwork.org/ https://primer.safenetwork.org/ Secondly, if you want proof that this project actually predates bitcoins, here is a talk the founder gave at Google Tech Talks in 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLA77zxk-vA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLA77zxk-vA And maybe it was just because of this that they found a way to solve the Bizantine Generals Problem independently without relying on blockchains. I hope you get the significance of this.
radihuq 6y ago
Was this a RuneScape private server (RSPS)? I remember back in the day you could find a free RSPS DDoS tool with a quick Google search, and all you had to do was enter the public IP address to start attacking. The culture for the RSPS scene was exactly what you're describing. Also there was another kind of attack where you would start thousands of bot clients at once that would spam messages. The hopes would be that you would (a) shut down the server, (b) attract the players to the server your bots were advertising
- malikNF 6y ago
  Not runescape, it was an old MMO that got abandoned, we modded the game kept it alive for almost 8 years before most of the Admins quit and we started our own company, last I heard the game is still running. As for the DDoS tools, after writing the parent comment just did a quick ddg search and you can still find several websites advertising services to DDoS. Some I recognize from back then. On a side-note doing a nslookup shows some of these sites are behind cloudflare haha. >>Also there was another kind of attack where you would start thousands of bot clients at once that would spam messages. The hopes would be that you would (a) shut down the server, (b) attract the players to the server your bots were advertising Oh man.. some people..
- loufe 6y ago
  I wondered when I'd see a mention of RSPSs on here. God what an excellent time of my life that was. Running a server with my brother got me into programming and tech and was such an absolute pleasure. We had the good fortune of never being DDoSed but I suppose our scale was small enough to avoid it (20 players max at any given time). I had never heard about the tool you're mentioning.
  - radihuq 6y ago
    Haha I'm in the exact same boat - creating my own server got me into programming and tech. A common tool was called Syipkpker[0]. It was really annoying dealing with these bots. All you could do is IP-ban them and pray the attacker didn't change their IP [0] https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x417fz2 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x417fz2
scandox 6y ago
Slightly OT but the significant thing about "Don't be Evil" is that Google had already taken the fundamental choices that were evil. The slogan itself is blatantly self-conscious - an acknowledgement of the insane power that would inevitably accumulate as a result of the business model they were pioneering.
- malikNF 6y ago
  I see. Now that makes it worse.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  I think that’s overly pessimistic. I think it may have helped delay the inevitable as it was in the back of their minds. I didn’t really completely give up on them until they renounced the slogan. It was a sad day and made it dead obvious they had gone full corporate.
- taylorfinley 6y ago
  I've long thought of it as a big-brothery admonishment: "Don't be evil... because we'll know about it." Sort of a Santa Claus Is Coming To Town style cutesy celebration of tyranny.
- toyg 6y ago
  > an acknowledgement of the insane power that would inevitably accumulate That's overthinking it. "Don't be evil" is just the kind of slogan that could emerge in the '90s, when it became clear that good and bad were not linked to a specific organizational form or trait - you could have bad capitalism and good collectivism as well as the other way around. There was a feeling that "big business" was bad but "medium business" could be a force for good, you only had to stay decent and things would work out. And of course the 'net would have rejected any clipper-chip and not replicate the historical corruption of the real world. Those were very naive times, in retrospect, but I don't blame the original googlers for believing in a simplistic view of the world. I blame Eric Schmidt and his sponsors for hiding their evil behind that line. Modern Google is basically all Schmidt.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
MR4D 6y ago
> When you guys fuck-up the rest of us have to suffer. Is there a lawyer here who can comment on whether the manufacturer of these horrid devices have any civil liability - either currently or possibly in the future? My gut tells me the only way this will get better is for their to be rules of negligence applied to the realm of computer security.
homero 6y ago
Cloudflare does any tcp now, maybe udp? https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-spectrum/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-spectrum/
tomphoolery 6y ago
Trying to DDoS someone because you got banned for saying racist things is the virtual predecessor to the Jan 6th insurrection.
- yurielt 6y ago
  No it is not the kids that used to do this kind of things rarely are part of the Q cult just because you don’t like two different kinds of people it doesn’t mean they are the same people mad about rigged elections are not the same as techy kids having fun so get a grip
  - daemoens 6y ago
    It's just a comparison of two groups similar reactions.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    It’s fair comparison in that they are both sets of garbage people overreacting when things don’t go their way. I find it a very apt comparison.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    I'm good friends with a whole bunch of small-time GOP operatives. No one serious, but people employed full-time in the broader GOP world. Think stuff like "staff for state senator" or "event organizer at regional chamber of commerce type orgs". I asked all of them in December if they were worried about violence given all the stolen election claims. I had TDS, etc. etc. I asked after Jan 6 for a post-mortem on their dismissals and every single one said they thought all of the people online were just trolling. Half of them work for employers who ended up sort of half-severing historically very deep ties with state GOP parties. So, I think there's probably a lot more truth in the GP than you give credit for.
    - shard972 6y ago
      99% of the people there was non violent
stcredzero 6y ago
The significant thing about "script kiddy DDOS" level attacks, is that they significantly raise the effort and expense for the smallest projects. This is exactly where the most important innovations happen: http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html Finally we moved over to OVH and placed a few really powerful servers in-front of the game server and applied some ipfilter rules to reduce common attacks. That ended up being the cheapest option out of all the options The cheaper attacks seem to be at the level, where machine learning could be able to counter them. Raising the bar for inexpensive attacks would be a huge boon to the internet and human progress. It wouldn't be that expensive to fund, either. We used to run a game server for a small community of around 400-500 people and DDos attacks were something we had to face almost every week, whenever someone got upset with the admin team, the go to solution was was to DDos, you get scammed by another player? DDos. Got banned for saying racist things ingame? DDos. You figured out a new way to cheat in game and the admins fixed it? DDos. I wonder if this sort of thing could be honeypotted? Give perpetrators a way to figure out and target a fake "edge server" of a particular user? (Which only affects about 5% of your user base, let's say.) However, that "edge server" is actually a honeypot that gathers data on the attack, and correlates that to support emails to the admin team, or flame wars in the game's forums. This is the kind of suckage that holds back the entire network, but which can ultimately be defeated: http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
- dasyatidprime 6y ago
  As far as auto-learning to counter such things, https://linuxsecurity.com/features/features/introducing-crowdsec https://linuxsecurity.com/features/features/introducing-crow... did show up recently: an attempt at a crowd-data-enhanced next-gen-fail2ban-alike. (Not an endorsement, never tried it.) I don't think it uses any of the techniques currently considered central to machine learning, but if it works well / catches on to start with then it could be a good place to see how useful those would be.
  - blibble 6y ago
    I don't see how that project helps solve the underlying problem: denial of service if the idea kicks off, instead of spamming packets directly at their targets: kiddies will switch to feeding cloud-fail2ban with their target's IP addresses and there will be paid services to do this for you same effect
judge2020 6y ago
> Definitely companies like cloudflare does an incredibly good job of stopping some insanely big attacks when it comes to http/https (I recently saw they were supporting udp and tcp based services now, never tried it). CF still requires an Enterprise contract for proxying arbitrary traffic via Spectrum, likely because of the abuse prevention aspect. Otherwise SSH and minecraft is offered at pay-as-you go rates, but a lot have complained about how expensive it is: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/what-do-you-think-about-the-high-costs-of-minecraft-spectrum/172771?u=judge https://community.cloudflare.com/t/what-do-you-think-about-t...
- duskwuff 6y ago
  Incidentally, I find it deeply weird that the only protocols supported by Cloudflare Spectrum below the enterprise level are SSH, RDP, and... Minecraft?! I mean, I guess it's a compelling use case for some customers. Still, it's a weird outlier.
  - jrockway 6y ago
    Minecraft is incredibly popular and it's normal to run your own server. (It's the 5th most-watched game on Twitch; at 81,000,000 hours per month!) I don't play, so I can't authoritatively say there is no company that provides "default" servers that new clients log into, but I've never heard of such a thing. (If you look at the other popular games on Twitch, they all provide servers and can't self host. GTA V, Fortnite, LoL, CoD, Valorant, etc. So there is no market for anything but Minecraft-related services.)
    - meowface 6y ago
      And perhaps more significantly, DDoS attacks against Minecraft servers are extremely common. There's a massive market dedicated purely to DDoSing Minecraft servers. In addition to its popularity, I would guess that this is probably related to the fact that the average age of Minecraft players is probably lower than the average age for most other popular online games. A disgruntled person between the age of 12 - 18 who knows they can completely shut down the fun-having ability of everyone they're pissed off at for a few dollars per hour will often feel pretty tempted.
Negitivefrags 6y ago
I don't know what it is about gaming that attracts DDoS events more than practically anything else, but there are a lot of server hosts that will not even rent you a server if they know that there will be a game hosted on it due to this. I have used Cloudflare Spectrum to prevent attacks. It does work incredibly well but the cost is significant. As for 3rd party copmanies, I do hate to rely on cloudflare for this. It is the worst business relationship by far I have ever been in, but yet there are no good alternatives we found.
- MaKey 6y ago
  > [...] but there are a lot of server hosts that will not even rent you a server if they know that there will be a game hosted on it due to this. Huh, I've only seen that with VPS hosters and thought it was related to game servers causing high CPU load on shared resources.
- eznzt 6y ago
  > I don't know what it is about gaming that attracts DDoS events more than practically anything else, but there are a lot of server hosts that will not even rent you a server if they know that there will be a game hosted on it due to this. Like IRC back in the day :P
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > I don't know what it is about gaming Gaming tends to attract a population that is tech-savvy (means), competitive (motive), and has copious leisure time (opportunity). Combine those three things and you have the kindling. The spark, I think, is due to the fact that the crowd was historically quite young. That means three things. First, impulsive. Second, nothing/less to lose (someone with real assets they Worked Hard For wouldn't Risk It All over an in-game spat). Third, might not've learned how to handle competition in a healthy way. A DDoS attack is a crime, but the sort that most law enforcement don't really care about at least in the context of a small-time game server. It's kind of the modern equivalent of knocking down mailboxes or shooting out traffic signs with a shotgun. Both things that cause actual damage that costs actual money, but which teenage males have been doing probably since the advent of mailboxes and shotguns.
trinovantes 6y ago
I'd like to learn more about using ipfilter filters on bare metal machines to mitigate ddos attacks. Do you have any recommendations?
tester756 6y ago
DDoS, 400-500ppl, OVH - let me guess the game, Tibia? edit: nvm.
s17n 6y ago
Iot device makers aren't going to be better just out of the goodness of their hearts - regulation / litigation is needed.
parliament32 6y ago
The magic of 3rd party anti-DDOS providers is rarely the software/methods: it's just about having bigger pipes. Everyone can figure out how to block volumetric attacks with iptables or whatever, the problem is if you have a 1 gig pipe from your transit provider, it's going to get saturated even before you can do any blocking. The 3rd parties can afford to have multiple 100g pipes with 10gbps commits in multiple DCs -- you share this cost with other customers for when you get attacked. That's kinda the entire point of 3rd party anti-DDOS providers, and not much else.

EGreg 6y ago

And this is why we need MaidSAFE instead of the Web. They don’t have DDOS attacks, instead you make money every time someone accesses a chunk of a resource, and the kademlia tree hides the hosts’ IP after one hop so the network and hosts can’t be taken down easily. Very different from Tor. https://maidsafe.net https://maidsafe.net is the best project to come out of the “Web3” space. If you heard of freenet, this is like freenet 2.0 PS: Why the massive silent downvotes? This platform actually solves the problem and many others HN constantly correctly complain about. But when posted, you prefer to ignore it. (Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with them in any way. In some ways they are a competitor to Qbix and Intercoin but I give credit where it is due.)

gilrain 6y ago
I think a lot of us are tired of cryptocurrency snake oil. It is an uphill battle to build things on a cryptocurrency and try to convince the wise that it isn't an elaborate vehicle for get-rich-quick speculation.
- EGreg 6y ago
  MaidSAFE is not a cryptocurrency. It’s a network closer to Tor and Freenet but architected way better. This is like downvoting all mentions of IPFS because FileCoin is a currency that is used to pay others for storing files. Or like downvoting all mentions of Freenet.
  - gilrain 6y ago
    > MaidSAFE is not a cryptocurrency Mmhm. Well, they raised money using an ICO, so apparently they felt their coin was worth people speculating on. Market cap is above $200 million. Maybe the technology is great, but it's built and operates like any other get-rich-quick crypto scheme. Their mission, if genuine, would be better served by a different approach. Avoid the appearance of impropriety and all that. I don't have much of an opinion and don't want to argue, but you did ask why people were downvoting. That's why.
    - piluso 6y ago
      I am Lolling at the "get-rich-quick scheme" criticism of yours. This project has been in development for 14 years. It is incredible that people don't even care to properly research it, and they blindly choose their favourite bias just to say something. On one side we have those who criticize for not being soon enough, and other for being a 14 years get-rich-quick-scheme. Fabulous. I would invite you to check out what the project is really about, check out: https://primer.safenetwork.org/ https://primer.safenetwork.org/ Secondly, if you want proof that this project actually predates bitcoins, here is a talk the founder gave at Google Tech Talks in 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLA77zxk-vA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLA77zxk-vA And maybe it was just because of this that they found a way to solve the Bizantine Generals Problem independently without relying on blockchains. I hope you get the significance of this.

radihuq 6y ago

Was this a RuneScape private server (RSPS)? I remember back in the day you could find a free RSPS DDoS tool with a quick Google search, and all you had to do was enter the public IP address to start attacking. The culture for the RSPS scene was exactly what you're describing. Also there was another kind of attack where you would start thousands of bot clients at once that would spam messages. The hopes would be that you would (a) shut down the server, (b) attract the players to the server your bots were advertising

malikNF 6y ago
Not runescape, it was an old MMO that got abandoned, we modded the game kept it alive for almost 8 years before most of the Admins quit and we started our own company, last I heard the game is still running. As for the DDoS tools, after writing the parent comment just did a quick ddg search and you can still find several websites advertising services to DDoS. Some I recognize from back then. On a side-note doing a nslookup shows some of these sites are behind cloudflare haha. >>Also there was another kind of attack where you would start thousands of bot clients at once that would spam messages. The hopes would be that you would (a) shut down the server, (b) attract the players to the server your bots were advertising Oh man.. some people..
loufe 6y ago
I wondered when I'd see a mention of RSPSs on here. God what an excellent time of my life that was. Running a server with my brother got me into programming and tech and was such an absolute pleasure. We had the good fortune of never being DDoSed but I suppose our scale was small enough to avoid it (20 players max at any given time). I had never heard about the tool you're mentioning.
- radihuq 6y ago
  Haha I'm in the exact same boat - creating my own server got me into programming and tech. A common tool was called Syipkpker[0]. It was really annoying dealing with these bots. All you could do is IP-ban them and pray the attacker didn't change their IP [0] https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x417fz2 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x417fz2

scandox 6y ago

Slightly OT but the significant thing about "Don't be Evil" is that Google had already taken the fundamental choices that were evil. The slogan itself is blatantly self-conscious - an acknowledgement of the insane power that would inevitably accumulate as a result of the business model they were pioneering.

malikNF 6y ago
I see. Now that makes it worse.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
I think that’s overly pessimistic. I think it may have helped delay the inevitable as it was in the back of their minds. I didn’t really completely give up on them until they renounced the slogan. It was a sad day and made it dead obvious they had gone full corporate.
taylorfinley 6y ago
I've long thought of it as a big-brothery admonishment: "Don't be evil... because we'll know about it." Sort of a Santa Claus Is Coming To Town style cutesy celebration of tyranny.
toyg 6y ago
> an acknowledgement of the insane power that would inevitably accumulate That's overthinking it. "Don't be evil" is just the kind of slogan that could emerge in the '90s, when it became clear that good and bad were not linked to a specific organizational form or trait - you could have bad capitalism and good collectivism as well as the other way around. There was a feeling that "big business" was bad but "medium business" could be a force for good, you only had to stay decent and things would work out. And of course the 'net would have rejected any clipper-chip and not replicate the historical corruption of the real world. Those were very naive times, in retrospect, but I don't blame the original googlers for believing in a simplistic view of the world. I blame Eric Schmidt and his sponsors for hiding their evil behind that line. Modern Google is basically all Schmidt.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

MR4D 6y ago

> When you guys fuck-up the rest of us have to suffer. Is there a lawyer here who can comment on whether the manufacturer of these horrid devices have any civil liability - either currently or possibly in the future? My gut tells me the only way this will get better is for their to be rules of negligence applied to the realm of computer security.

homero 6y ago

Cloudflare does any tcp now, maybe udp? https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-spectrum/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-spectrum/

tomphoolery 6y ago

Trying to DDoS someone because you got banned for saying racist things is the virtual predecessor to the Jan 6th insurrection.

yurielt 6y ago
No it is not the kids that used to do this kind of things rarely are part of the Q cult just because you don’t like two different kinds of people it doesn’t mean they are the same people mad about rigged elections are not the same as techy kids having fun so get a grip
- daemoens 6y ago
  It's just a comparison of two groups similar reactions.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  It’s fair comparison in that they are both sets of garbage people overreacting when things don’t go their way. I find it a very apt comparison.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  I'm good friends with a whole bunch of small-time GOP operatives. No one serious, but people employed full-time in the broader GOP world. Think stuff like "staff for state senator" or "event organizer at regional chamber of commerce type orgs". I asked all of them in December if they were worried about violence given all the stolen election claims. I had TDS, etc. etc. I asked after Jan 6 for a post-mortem on their dismissals and every single one said they thought all of the people online were just trolling. Half of them work for employers who ended up sort of half-severing historically very deep ties with state GOP parties. So, I think there's probably a lot more truth in the GP than you give credit for.
  - shard972 6y ago
    99% of the people there was non violent

stcredzero 6y ago

The significant thing about "script kiddy DDOS" level attacks, is that they significantly raise the effort and expense for the smallest projects. This is exactly where the most important innovations happen: http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html Finally we moved over to OVH and placed a few really powerful servers in-front of the game server and applied some ipfilter rules to reduce common attacks. That ended up being the cheapest option out of all the options The cheaper attacks seem to be at the level, where machine learning could be able to counter them. Raising the bar for inexpensive attacks would be a huge boon to the internet and human progress. It wouldn't be that expensive to fund, either. We used to run a game server for a small community of around 400-500 people and DDos attacks were something we had to face almost every week, whenever someone got upset with the admin team, the go to solution was was to DDos, you get scammed by another player? DDos. Got banned for saying racist things ingame? DDos. You figured out a new way to cheat in game and the admins fixed it? DDos. I wonder if this sort of thing could be honeypotted? Give perpetrators a way to figure out and target a fake "edge server" of a particular user? (Which only affects about 5% of your user base, let's say.) However, that "edge server" is actually a honeypot that gathers data on the attack, and correlates that to support emails to the admin team, or flame wars in the game's forums. This is the kind of suckage that holds back the entire network, but which can ultimately be defeated: http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

dasyatidprime 6y ago
As far as auto-learning to counter such things, https://linuxsecurity.com/features/features/introducing-crowdsec https://linuxsecurity.com/features/features/introducing-crow... did show up recently: an attempt at a crowd-data-enhanced next-gen-fail2ban-alike. (Not an endorsement, never tried it.) I don't think it uses any of the techniques currently considered central to machine learning, but if it works well / catches on to start with then it could be a good place to see how useful those would be.
- blibble 6y ago
  I don't see how that project helps solve the underlying problem: denial of service if the idea kicks off, instead of spamming packets directly at their targets: kiddies will switch to feeding cloud-fail2ban with their target's IP addresses and there will be paid services to do this for you same effect

judge2020 6y ago

> Definitely companies like cloudflare does an incredibly good job of stopping some insanely big attacks when it comes to http/https (I recently saw they were supporting udp and tcp based services now, never tried it). CF still requires an Enterprise contract for proxying arbitrary traffic via Spectrum, likely because of the abuse prevention aspect. Otherwise SSH and minecraft is offered at pay-as-you go rates, but a lot have complained about how expensive it is: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/what-do-you-think-about-the-high-costs-of-minecraft-spectrum/172771?u=judge https://community.cloudflare.com/t/what-do-you-think-about-t...

duskwuff 6y ago
Incidentally, I find it deeply weird that the only protocols supported by Cloudflare Spectrum below the enterprise level are SSH, RDP, and... Minecraft?! I mean, I guess it's a compelling use case for some customers. Still, it's a weird outlier.
- jrockway 6y ago
  Minecraft is incredibly popular and it's normal to run your own server. (It's the 5th most-watched game on Twitch; at 81,000,000 hours per month!) I don't play, so I can't authoritatively say there is no company that provides "default" servers that new clients log into, but I've never heard of such a thing. (If you look at the other popular games on Twitch, they all provide servers and can't self host. GTA V, Fortnite, LoL, CoD, Valorant, etc. So there is no market for anything but Minecraft-related services.)
  - meowface 6y ago
    And perhaps more significantly, DDoS attacks against Minecraft servers are extremely common. There's a massive market dedicated purely to DDoSing Minecraft servers. In addition to its popularity, I would guess that this is probably related to the fact that the average age of Minecraft players is probably lower than the average age for most other popular online games. A disgruntled person between the age of 12 - 18 who knows they can completely shut down the fun-having ability of everyone they're pissed off at for a few dollars per hour will often feel pretty tempted.

Negitivefrags 6y ago

I don't know what it is about gaming that attracts DDoS events more than practically anything else, but there are a lot of server hosts that will not even rent you a server if they know that there will be a game hosted on it due to this. I have used Cloudflare Spectrum to prevent attacks. It does work incredibly well but the cost is significant. As for 3rd party copmanies, I do hate to rely on cloudflare for this. It is the worst business relationship by far I have ever been in, but yet there are no good alternatives we found.

MaKey 6y ago
> [...] but there are a lot of server hosts that will not even rent you a server if they know that there will be a game hosted on it due to this. Huh, I've only seen that with VPS hosters and thought it was related to game servers causing high CPU load on shared resources.
eznzt 6y ago
> I don't know what it is about gaming that attracts DDoS events more than practically anything else, but there are a lot of server hosts that will not even rent you a server if they know that there will be a game hosted on it due to this. Like IRC back in the day :P
throwawaygh 6y ago
> I don't know what it is about gaming Gaming tends to attract a population that is tech-savvy (means), competitive (motive), and has copious leisure time (opportunity). Combine those three things and you have the kindling. The spark, I think, is due to the fact that the crowd was historically quite young. That means three things. First, impulsive. Second, nothing/less to lose (someone with real assets they Worked Hard For wouldn't Risk It All over an in-game spat). Third, might not've learned how to handle competition in a healthy way. A DDoS attack is a crime, but the sort that most law enforcement don't really care about at least in the context of a small-time game server. It's kind of the modern equivalent of knocking down mailboxes or shooting out traffic signs with a shotgun. Both things that cause actual damage that costs actual money, but which teenage males have been doing probably since the advent of mailboxes and shotguns.

trinovantes 6y ago

I'd like to learn more about using ipfilter filters on bare metal machines to mitigate ddos attacks. Do you have any recommendations?

tester756 6y ago

DDoS, 400-500ppl, OVH - let me guess the game, Tibia? edit: nvm.

s17n 6y ago

Iot device makers aren't going to be better just out of the goodness of their hearts - regulation / litigation is needed.

parliament32 6y ago

The magic of 3rd party anti-DDOS providers is rarely the software/methods: it's just about having bigger pipes. Everyone can figure out how to block volumetric attacks with iptables or whatever, the problem is if you have a 1 gig pipe from your transit provider, it's going to get saturated even before you can do any blocking. The 3rd parties can afford to have multiple 100g pipes with 10gbps commits in multiple DCs -- you share this cost with other customers for when you get attacked. That's kinda the entire point of 3rd party anti-DDOS providers, and not much else.