Says servers may have problems.
Tag: DDOS
ArcheAge Dealing With DDOS Attacks As Servers Strain
If you’re having trouble logging into ArcheAge today, you aren’t alone. Gamigo has stated via the official ArcheAge Twitter account that servers are dealing with several distributed denial of service attacks that the company is working on mitigating.
Players may have trouble logging in during this period.
We had several incidents resulting in disconnects today starting this morning.
We’ve been dealing with several DDOS attacks today and are working on mitigating those.
We apologize for any service interruption that has been caused by it.~The ArcheAge Team
— ArcheAge (@ArcheAge) November 26, 2019
SOE DDOS’er Gets 27 Months In Prison, $95 Thousand Fine
Another Sony Online Entertainment hacker is going to prison after entering a plea deal with prosecutors. Austin Thompson of Utah pleaded guilty to his part in a denial of service attack on Sony Online Entertainment’s servers as well as other victims between 2013 and 2014. Thompson, for those who recall, headed the hacker group Derp Trolling, and took down a number of services for hours at a time, boasting about his deeds on Twitter for the world to see.
Thompson faced a maximum of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine under 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(5)(A), Damage to a Protected Computer.
“Thompson typically used the Twitter account @DerpTrolling to announce that an attack was imminent and then posted “scalps” (screenshots or other photos showing that victims’ servers had been taken down) after the attack. The attacks took down game servers and related computers around the world, often for hours at a time. According to the plea agreement, Thompson’s actions caused at least $95,000 in damages.”
The $95,000 fine will be paid to Daybreak Game Company, formerly Sony Online Entertainment.
Source: Justice.gov
Denial of Service: US Judge Sentences Warcraft DDoS Attacker To Prison
The odds of getting caught while firing off denial of service attacks against corporate servers may be low, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that the act is any less criminal. Romanian citizen Calin Mateias found that lesson out the hard way when a judge issued a one year prison sentence and $30,000 in damages after the man was found guilty of attacking the World of Warcraft servers. The distributed denial of service attacks lasted from February to September 2010 and were primarily motivated out of a “juvenile desire” to beat his rivals.
Yes, a 37 year old man will be spending a year in prison because he so desperately wanted to beat people in World of Warcraft that he committed a criminal act. Mateias was also required to foot Blizzard’s costs in preventing his attacks at the time, which ran close to thirty thousand dollars. In case that doesn’t paint enough of a picture, Mateias used the online handle “Dr. Mengele,” after the infamous Nazi doctor.
(Source: BBC)
[Community] Mob Mentality, Jason Vorhees, and Website Policy
For this week’s Community article, I’d like to bring up as subject that has been discussed to death over the past few years yet still remains a pervasive issue in not just the gaming community, but virtually every aspect of human life especially when the internet is concerned: Mob mentality and the internet’s ever populous septic tank of human refuse that plagues every community.
If you haven’t been paying attention, Friday the 13th developer Illfonic got caught in some hot water this weekend after a player got banned for allegedly sexually harassing a group of players including a 12 year old girl. The topic has been covered by a number of Youtubers, which you can find and catch up on if you want to know the story, but instead of talking about semantics, I’m going to summarize MMO Fallout’s response to this controversy in one paragraph:
I didn’t write about it, and looking at all of the misinformation that has come out and been repeated by various Youtubers, I am doubling down that not writing about it was the right thing to do. I throw around the term game journalist like it’s a joke sometimes, but this website does strive to follow the SPJ code of ethics, and rules one and two are seek the truth and minimize harm respectively. That didn’t happen in this case.
Among the big book of rules written for MMO Fallout, discussing reports of game bans is virtually off the table except in rare circumstances where the developer is blatantly crossing an ethical line by handing out bans for poor reviews or doing something shady and banning people in the hopes to silence that information. At the end of the day, bans are subjective, and as incredible as it sounds, people who are punished tend to lie about the circumstances surrounding their ban. I say this as someone who has a long history that includes GM’ing an MMO and owning/moderating servers for games like Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty, and more. You’ll be a lot more skeptical after the tenth person you’ve banned in a month (after repeated warnings) for using racist slurs in chat shows up on the forums and says he has “no idea why he was banned for just playing the game better than everyone else.”
But more importantly, these topics tend to be eighty sixed because the internet can’t behave itself, and such coverage is only guaranteed to result in the mob mentality’s three D’s: Death threats, doxxing, and DDOS attacks. Not only has the harassment campaign by online sociopaths begun against Friday the 13th’s developers, but the servers have been hit more than once by attackers trying to either punish the developers or simply ruin the experience.
And make no bones about it, I don’t blame either the guy who got banned for airing his grief or the Youtubers for popularizing the controversy for this response, as I have written numerous times in the past, it doesn’t take much incitement for death threats to start rolling in. It’s also important that we don’t just accept this sort of action and continue to weed out and remove such bad actors.
The player in question has even apologized for what the developers have endured following his review, an act that should be commended in spite of genuinely being unnecessary. It also shows how disturbing parts of the net have become:
I know what its like to be doxxed. I know what it’s like to have your family called and have horrible things been said to them. That’s why I can no longer continue to support this. I have been approached by people on steam, asking me to??????the 12 year old I was in the game with, and to give out the people in the matches information so they could doxx them and kill them. The things people have said to me have really scared me these past couple of days and in no way shape or form did I want this to happen.
While I will never blame content creators for the actions of their community (unless said action is directly or implicitly instructed by said creator), you absolutely have an obligation to verify the facts before making statements.
Other than that I have no opinion on the matter.
Daybreak Servers Slammed by DDOS Attack
We are aware of current connectivity issues and are working to resolve them. Thanks for your patience.
— Daybreak Games (@DaybreakGames) December 30, 2015
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
If you’re looking to play any of Daybreak’s games, you might want to take the night off. At the moment, Daybreaks game servers and their websites are experiencing major connection issues which appear to be stemming from a coordinated denial of service attack. The official Daybreak Twitter account has acknowledged the problem and notes that staff are working to fix issues.
According to the Norse attack map, however, there is a massive sustained DDoS attack originating from Mersin in Turkey aimed at the western coast of the United States. Whether or not this attack is related to the server downtime is unknown.
(Source: Daybreak Twitter)
John Smedley Quits Twitter After Argument Leads to DDOS, Threats
John Smedley has quit Twitter, an announcement that will have a good portion of Daybreak’s communities giving a sigh of relief. Responding to a thread on Reddit over his account suddenly going dark, Smedley confirmed that he is walking away from the social media platform.
I really love making games. It makes me happy. I saw Twitter as a great way to talk 1-1 with players which I love doing. I’m simply not going to let this make me lose focus….but I am going to walk away from Twitter and not miss it for a second. Life’s too short to let things distract me from what I really like doing. I will miss the interaction with our players though. A great deal.
Whether he left voluntarily or was pressured from within Daybreak, Smedley’s exist is likely due to a rather high profile event last week where Smedley called out a couple of members of Lizard Squad. The hacker group responded with a series of attacks on Daybreak’s servers, which escalated to doxxing threats against Daybreak employees.
(Source: Reddit)
Top 5: Most Disappointing Moments of the Year
With the year coming to an end, it’s time to start taking stories and sticking them into categories. Since I’m a well known optimist, I decided to start this month’s lists off with a look at the year’s greatest disappointments. Since a lot of what constitutes a “disappointment” is subjective, I ignored specific news pieces and tried to stick with general events.
This article is in no particular order.
1. ArcheAge… Just ArcheAge.
Where do you even start with a story like this? The rampant gold farming, exploits, dupes, and hacks that make it more newsworthy to simply report on when something isn’t going wrong in ArcheAge? How about Trion Worlds misleading their customers with false promises of discounts that would later be recanted because they apparently couldn’t be bothered waiting? Or the server instability? Or the economic turmoil caused by Trion’s greedy obsession with lock boxes?
Or the problem with housing being overrun by exploits? Or the unexplained downtime recently of nearly seventy two hours that still hasn’t been properly discussed by Trion Worlds? Or the fact that you had to have been a patron to receive the full compensation package? How about the forums being so poorly moderated that gold spam, thread spam, and pornography can be found appearing for hours at a time?
It would be a lot harder to lay the blame on Trion as mere publisher were this not the same strategy that caused the Defiance community to leave in droves, with Trion ignoring major game problems to focus on subtly altering core game mechanics to nerf in-game progress and hopefully divert players to cash shop lock boxes. The end result in Defiance was that the game could be found at the bottom of the bargain bin long before it ever went free to play, and ArcheAge would be sitting right next to it if the game had ever seen a box release.
2. That Unlicensed Harry Potter MMO
The string of high profile disasters has lowered my opinion of licensed MMOs considerably, but my disappointment in the unlicensed Harry Potter MMO from earlier this year wasn’t the fact that it was canned barely a week after it was announced, but the idea that the developer thought they could get away with it.
Here’s the story: At the beginning of the year, this group called Bio-Hazard Entertainment popped up and claimed that Warner Bros had given them permission to create a Harry Potter MMO, at least up until beta, and then would decide whether or not to fully greenlight the project. This claim, as it turned out, wasn’t so true. The website went down less than a week later and Bio-Hazard announced that they would be working on a different wizard MMO, one not related to Harry Potter, but encouraged gamers to contact Warner Bros and demand a Harry Potter MMO.
You have to admire the confidence of some no-name team thinking that they could just start working on a Harry Potter MMO and that Warner Bros. would be so impressed that they’d happily license the property. Forgetting of course, or ignoring, the numerous developers Warner Bros. had no doubt turned away, with larger budgets, bigger teams, and the experience to guarantee that such a large project could be seen through to the end.
3.DDOS Attacks
As I said back in 2013:
If I had a nickel for every time some individual or group launched a denial of service attack against a website or service that they didn’t like, I would put those nickels in a sock and use it to beat them unconscious.
Distributed Denial of Service attacks have only gotten worse in 2014, and it looks like 2015 is going to be just as bad. We’ve hit a point where the act has become as casual as racists commenting on the news. RuneScape players DDoS the servers for advantages in PvP, Minecraft players DDoS “competing” servers, almost every MMO to launch or release a major update/expansion has been DDoS’d this year, the console servers were attacked, Xbox Live is under attack currently, and so on and so forth.
I suppose the only upside to this is that eventually these kids tend to get caught because their ego gets the best of them and they do something stupid like trying to hack the CIA, or sending a bomb threat to an airline, and it is pretty fun to read about them crying in court before they’re sentenced to a few years in prison.
4. PMB Kills From Beyond The Grave
Pando Media Booster is so toxic of a piece of malware that it can’t even be dead and buried without poisoning the land around it. After a life spent sapping bandwidth, slowing computers, crashing programs, and being a general nuisance that plagued MMOs and frustrated gamers, we were happy to see the service finally die in August 2013. Like any good plague, however, it didn’t stay dead for long. Pando Media Booster was revived by some digital necromancer back in February to continue spreading its bile, this time distributing viruses and browser hijacks.
The program sent out update notices to users who had forgotten to uninstall it, or were unaware that it was still on their system, infecting computers with the Sweet Page browser hijacker. Can I get one last joke in about Pando Media Booster? When PMB turned into a distribution platform for malware, how did anyone notice?
5. Long Term Cancellations
While the MMO industry is no stranger to sudden cancellations, the long development cycle and a practice of announcing titles long before they are even considered viable to launch, it’s possible to spend a lot of time waiting for a game that just never comes out. World of Darkness was announced eight years ago only to be confirmed as cancelled earlier this year. Blizzard first hinted at Project Titan back in 2007 when they started hiring for a next-gen MMO, only to come out and say that the game has been scrapped seven years later.
Gamers don’t like being strung along, especially when it later becomes obvious that the developer’s outward enthusiasm was a veil covering their real sentiment, that the game wasn’t fun, wasn’t being competently developed or wasn’t coming close to development roadmaps, didn’t have a snowball’s chance of being funded to completion, or would be the first thing to thrown under the bus should profits dip even a little on the developer’s live services. At the very least, and this is more than we can say about certain other games, developers like Blizzard, CCP, and Jagex never asked their community to donate to fund these lost causes, which they likely could have done and recuperated quite a bit.
Wildstar Early Access Hammered By DDOS
With players piling into Wildstar’s servers for early access, what more could a developer possibly ask for? A denial of service attack, apparently. Executive Producer Jeremy Gaffney posted on the game’s Reddit to confirm that the servers were under attack and that it was being handled. Since then the servers have come back to normal.
I’ve heard from a few folks it’s a confirmed DDOS attack (real time updates, may change, fog of war, etc.). Partially handled. Servers taking in some players now, player counts rising. Ninjitsu continue.
Never underestimate the potential of anonymous basement dwellers with botnets.
(Source: Reddit)
[Community] The Despicable DDoS
![[Community] The Despicable DDoS](https://mmofallout.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/2013-10-25_00005.jpg?w=1200)
If I had a nickel for every time some individual or group launched a denial of service attack against a website or service that they didn’t like, I would put those nickels in a sock and use it to beat them unconscious. I’m old enough to remember a time when DDoS attacks were much more rare and feared not only because of how much they could cost in terms of damages or fees, but because they generally had some kind of motive behind them, be it retaliation or to even hold a service ransom. These days the denial of service attack has become so simple and accessible that people in RuneScape are using it on each other to gain an edge in player killing! Players in Garry’s Mod DOS each other’s servers and call it “competition.” The Garry’s Mod official forums itself is a regular target of denial of service attacks in response to bans targeting specific cheat programs.
The rate at which denial of service attacks are becoming increasingly common is disgusting, even more so when you look at how many of them are likely breaking things for the sake of breaking things. Big name developers like Jagex are being hit in retaliation by the gold farming criminals they ban, and the past two years alone saw attacks on Eve Online, Wurm, Darkfall, Dino Storm, Dofus, Perpetuum Online, TUG, Cubeworld, and countless more. Even Extra Life was not immune to the power of a few keyboard-wielding psychopaths.
As companies like Amazon and Google jump into the fray to bring more affordable protection to websites via cloud protection and mitigation, we can only hope that they will spell the death of the denial of service attack. Until then, when the method of delivery is about as complicated as logging into the Facebook account that you’re about to DOS, you can expect to see such attacks continue to propagate.
MMO Fallout 