I get it. These DDOS things are not something that Blizzard can control or stop. No one can do anything about them and they are relatively cheap to pull off.
But this question is to those that know about DDOS and how they work:
How long can this person/s prevent us from playing this game? A couple of days? A week? Longer? Can they put an end to WoW? Am I being over-dramatic (if I am, it is due to my lack of knowledge on this subject)?
How long can one person, or a group of people, inconvenience hundreds of thousands and get away with it?
So technically speaking, no matter how far fetched it is, if he never got bored of this, and managed to avoid authorities, he could stop us from playing WoW forever?
Yes, but at the same time, whenever someone does ddos, there has to be a signal from a location sent out to disrupt the servers. That location can be traced, same reason why sensitive information sent over the phone can be traced.
Yeah, but this isnât something Blizzard can get on the horn with and have authorities rush to the location and shut them down, Iâd imagine. It could be some time before any action is taken.
I think this is a very sad situation, probably Blizzard also thinks this is sad. Itâs sad because people canât play but also very sad in that the person doing the DDoSing will get a heavy punishment. It will not be fun to be the DDoSer when he gets found out :â(
Partially correct. Remember that this is an attack on the ISP that blizzard uses for their servers. If that same ISP runs VOIP (Voice over IP) through the same lines and it is hogging up bandwidth it could become a federal issue due to a âtampering with phone linesâ charge being tacked on. Mind you this is theoretical. Could be fun to watch on live TV though.
Regarding that matter, although it is true that it will take time, he is still going to face charges against him. Blizzard will want to get in on the fine that guy has to pay for lol
Most ddos attacks come from a botnet which are usually made up from compromised systems that are dormant until asked to start connecting.
You could be part of a botnet and not even know. There is no tracking where the âsignalâ came from in most cases. Dude isnât connecting to Blizz, himself.
This is absolutely false and people need to stop parroting it.
Blizzard could absolutely do something about it by switching to virtual distributed servers through AWS or Google. They would save money if they get rid of some of their datacenters, using a couple as raid backups for the virtual servers. Itâs not an issue of cost.
Activision-Blizzard is probably is too stubborn at the executive level to allow another company to be in control of their data.
The current infrastructure they use is outdated and vulnerable to these DDoS attacks, as we can all obviously see. They have physical stacks with public forward facing IPâs, that allows this kind of thing to happen so easily. I work in Database Engineering and Architecture, this is not an âIT Securityâ problem, this is an infrastructure problem.
Blizzard needs to get with the times. Virtual distributed servers can load balance a DDoS like this easily. Not using them currently is blatantly a bad decision.
People who know nothing about databasing or network infrastructure need to stop all going around parroting the same thing they heard someone else parroting, thinking their smarter than people asking Blizz to do something about this by being smug and wrong, they absolutely can fix this.
Come on dude, seriously. Even if this âthreat mitigationâ crap were true (which you clearly bought into hook/line/sinker), theyâd have to migrate their entire operation to an external data center. How much time and money do you think this costs?
edit: Furthermore, do you really think that load balancing is a thing that came around with Docker and Kubernetes? Is this new technology to you? Come on man, for real, what makes you think that any of this stuff that AWS/Openshift/Azure is doing is all that new? Or designed for video games (and not web services as previously mentioned)?
I literally do this for a living. I build Azure databases and migrate data all the time. I make my own virtual servers and use commercial distributed servers too.
You have no clue dude, go be wrong somewhere else. Itâs not as hard as you think to migrate the servers they use to virtual servers, you basically make an image of the server drive and load it on a virtual machine. It would save them money to do this, not cost.
Also, you obviously donât know how virtual distributed servers work if you think they are âmigrating their entire operation to an external data center.â
If you do this for a living then you donât do a very good job.
If DDOS werenât an effective attack, it wouldnât be as heavily utilized as it is. Load balancing isnât new. Read the document, google AWS threat mitigation. Itâs all there, read it for yourself.
When you make six figures working in database engineering and architecture for a government contractor, in which these things are commonly done all the time, then come talk to me. Your probably some insufferable know it all who thinks their always right when they donât know sh.t.
Lol dude, load balancing isnât new. It didnât come out with Docker and Kubernetes. Give me a break. AWS is designed for containerized applications. Google AWS threat mitigation and read the actual document that AWS themselves put out about this exact topic. The thread mitigation is your responsibility, itâs behaviors and not software.
DDOS is an attack on a service provider. The entire point is to diminish trust in that service provider, causing a loss of revenue. Blizzard is the victim. You are the victim.