[H8crilA]

"Fun" fact: Microsoft set up Minecraft to be open to everyone by default. Consequence: griefing groups that scan the web and blow the ever living shit of whatever they can find on those random servers (TNT blocks can be supplied by item duplication exploits): https://youtu.be/hoS0PM20KJk

[beaconstudios]

Yup, my family minecraft server fell victim to that. Thankfully it was a new map with only a couple days' work into it, but annoying nonetheless.

Whitelist your private servers!

[lostlogin]

Requiring a VPN is how I handled that - not so much for preventing people from joining the game but because I don’t like open ports.

I’m surprised that VPN usage isn’t more common for minecraft players.

[alar44]

It's not more common because it doesn't really make sense.

[lostlogin]

Can you explain this a bit further?

Is white listing users the way to avoid it? I’m possibly too cautious and only have a couple of ports allowed though.

[SirGiggles]

In essence, without knowing much more about your setup, you're just shifting responsibility somewhere else.

Whitelisting is the route most (no actual statistics to backup, but based on personal intuition) would take because the server can prevent a connection after making a authentication (online-mode=true) and authorization (white-list=true) check.

Mesh like VPN solutions used to be popular in the past with software like Hamachi but, at least in my experience, performance was dismal and required additional setup for potentially non-technically minded end users.