| 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. |
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