DDoS Game Protection: How you can Protect From & Avoid Attacks

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) has been a plague on the Web for a long time. DDoS is a cyberattack that overwhelms servers or users with voluminous traffic or requests, affecting performance and user experience. 

While several mitigation techniques exist to guard servers from DDoS, it stays a scourge to organizations, especially regarding gaming. Whethther you’re developing your first title otherwise you’re a longtime publisher, game DDoS protection is an integral a part of providing seamless service to your customers. 

In gaming, there are two predominant concerns regarding DDoS.

First are attacks on individual gamers. As a result of the competitive nature of online gaming, this tends to be essentially the most common type of DDoS in gaming. Attackers find the IPs of other gamers and eat up their bandwidth by inundating their connections with traffic/requests. The victim of a DDoS attack experiences poor and unstable performance, giving the attacker a competitive gaming edge. These attacks may even force players to disconnect from lobbies and matches.

Outside of gamers attacking each other, the opposite kind of DDoS attack in gaming directly targets servers of video game publishers or common platforms like PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam. As these attacks are intended to disrupt all the system, they’re likely not motivated by competition. Like DDoS attacks on some other server, DDoS on game servers goals to overwhelm and bathroom down the servers with excessive amounts of traffic. 

Imagine there’s a hot, recent multiplayer title gaining a ton of attention from gaming content creators (think Amongst Us or Fall Guys during peak interest in 2020). Nonetheless, despite the positive press leading as much as launch day, the publisher notices an uptick in negative sentiment from social media platforms. It is because the studio’s founder is usually outspoken about hot-button issues equivalent to climate change and inclusion in gaming. And regardless that the developer and operations teams guarantee a smooth launch, 1000’s of players can’t access the sport as hacktivists DDoS the servers during launch day. 

Within the above scenario, a gaggle of bad actors banded together to activate their network of bot traffic to flood the sport developer’s server as a part of a DDoS attack. Although players can log in inside 12 hours after the launch, who knows how well the general public reception would have been had there been no DDoS attack.

Why are game servers targeted? 

Attackers turn to DDoS attacks for reasons equivalent to revenge, hacktivism, political motivations, or as a precursor to a more severe attack like an information breach. Outside of those reasons, DDoS attacks in gaming are motivated by hackers in search of attention, recognition, or just amusement. Gamers are inclined to be a vocal group and can loudly voice their frustration attributable to a successful DDoS of their favorite game’s server, giving the attacker the eye they seek.

Money doesn’t appear to be the first motive behind most DDoS attacks, but there are cases where it’s an element. As an example, let’s examine what DDoS means in Minecraft. Some Minecraft servers have been known to attack rival servers in hopes of stealing their users. One other common reason for DDoS attacks within the Minecraft community is to cause frustration for gamers on a server—also often known as griefing or trolling, which might have negative monetary consequences for the targeted community.

With the ever-looming threat of attacks, it’s clear to see why game server DDoS protection is so essential to gaming corporations. Even big names in gaming that you just might expect to have strong budgets for security are susceptible. As recently as 2020, Activision Blizzard servers suffered a DDoS attack that interrupted the gameplay of popular titles like Overwatch, World of Warcraft, and Call of Duty. 

An excellent solution to stop DDoS attacks in gaming from happening is to grasp how they work. As stated earlier, DDoS attacks work by overwhelming servers with traffic and requests, thereby bogging down the server so it may well’t work for legitimate users.

Generally, there are two forms of DDoS attacks in gaming:

1. Volumetric, or bombardment: Works by sending more traffic to the server than it may well handle.
2. Layer 7, or technical infections: Disrupts an application on the server by sending it more requests than it may well handle.

Layer 7 attacks have turn into more common as these attacks take fewer resources to execute. By focusing and taking down a vulnerable server application, attackers are sometimes in a position to take down the entire server. A difficulty these attackers face concerns the bandwidth needed to conduct their DDoS attacks. In spite of everything, sending requests to a server does use bandwidth. 

Unfortunately, cybercriminals have a seemingly never-ending source available to them, namely Web of Things (IoT) devices. For essentially the most part, these IoT devices don’t have adequate firmware or security systems you may see in other connected devices. This makes them prime targets for hackers who can use malware to take control of the devices and leach off of their bandwidth to conduct DDoS attacks.

There may be an ebb and flow to the specter of DDoS to gaming. As security measures turn into more advanced to decelerate DDoS, the attacks appear to eventually turn into more advanced, causing a kind of tug of war. That said, there are effective measures to take for game DDoS protection. 

1. Discover Incoming Traffic and Requests: To discover traffic and requests coming into the server, software and firewalls can fairly accurately discover insincere traffic and act as a gatekeeper. This will keep DDoS attacks from successfully grabbing hold of the server. Authentication procedures equivalent to CAPTCHA may also help to confirm that incoming traffic is real. Nonetheless, firewalls are only one line of defense against DDoS attacks and never an ideal gatekeeper. Consider that they will turn into overwhelmed, have rules fooled by SYN floods, or attackers can goal assets that aren’t behind a firewall. 
2. Use a Reverse Proxy: While not entirely designed for DDoS, a reverse proxy server acts like a buffer between traffic/request and the actual dedicated gaming server. This helps mitigate DDoS because the attackers don’t have direct access to the server.
3. Use VPN as a Shield: On the person gamer level, using a VPN goes a great distance towards stopping DDoS attacks. As a substitute of seeing the goal’s IP, the attacker will see the VPN and attack it. VPN’s are almost at all times more prepared to handle DDoS attacks than the common gamer.

It’s price mentioning that DDoS protection is more about prevention than it’s reactive. While VPNs are an excellent tool gamers themselves can employ, developers should consider hosts that protect protect networks and gamers with tools equivalent to Cloudflare, Arbor Networks, Akamai, and Barracuda.

DDoS attacks are common, but they aren’t at all times as successful as attackers would really like. The perfect solution to thwart a DDoS attack and keep your game server running is by practicing a preventative approach by employing the sport DDoS protection measures explained above. They’re designed to thwart DDoS attacks with as little disruption to your servers as possible.

Dedicated server hosting services often offer built-in DDoS protection. Typically, these services will include a set volume of DDoS bandwidth protection. All Liquid Web servers include basic DDoS protection of as much as 2Gbps. As well as, you may upgrade the service for much more protection against volumetric and Layer 7 attacks. Learn more about Liquid Web’s game DDoS Protection options.