SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - View Single Post - Great, now I have to deal with DoS attacks to play my game?

kludger · 03-10-10, 09:58 PM

In my experience working in IT for large scale customer facing websites, it's not unusual for a web application which is not appropriately scaled to handle the amount of release traffic to fail under load and for the folks responsible for it to look to point to a Distributed Denial of Service Attack as a convenient cause by the bad guys, which ironically enough looks just like when all your customers who are hitting you from all over the world and are overrunning your app/server/bandwidth and bringing it to it's knees which then makes them reconnect, try again lather, rinse, repeat, the diversity in source IPs and routes of the traffic becomes the distributed attack.

So I am not 100% buying it that it's really a DDOS as opposed to just poor capacity planning by Ubisoft at the same time that they were releasing two new games that required this always on DRM connection to their server.

Also if indeed it was DDOS there is no excuse for them to not be prepared for it or mitigate it, any large size website nowadays has mitigated the DDOS attack by implementing technology designed to identify the DDOS attack packets and scrub them out of the traffic (i.e. Arbor Peakflow), this scrubbing results in higher latency to the site during the attack, but allows the application/server/site to stay available to customers. This type of DDOS mitigation is usually available as a service from the ISP provider or is also available as devices that can be installed on the hosting site.

So I am not totally buying that this is a DDOS as opposed to covering up for poor capacity planning by Ubisoft, and if it is DDOS they also failed to plan for it despite throwing down the gauntlet against pirates that this DRM was foolproof.

I bought SH5 knowing the annoyance and risks but hoping for the best, and so far I've lucked out that the DRM has been working when I needed to play, worst case if the DRM stops me from playing for long enough to bug me I will be justified in looking for alternative ways to play the game I paid for.

03-10-10, 09:58 PM	#8
kludger Swabbie Join Date: May 2005 Posts: 5 Downloads: 10 Uploads: 0	In my experience working in IT for large scale customer facing websites, it's not unusual for a web application which is not appropriately scaled to handle the amount of release traffic to fail under load and for the folks responsible for it to look to point to a Distributed Denial of Service Attack as a convenient cause by the bad guys, which ironically enough looks just like when all your customers who are hitting you from all over the world and are overrunning your app/server/bandwidth and bringing it to it's knees which then makes them reconnect, try again lather, rinse, repeat, the diversity in source IPs and routes of the traffic becomes the distributed attack. So I am not 100% buying it that it's really a DDOS as opposed to just poor capacity planning by Ubisoft at the same time that they were releasing two new games that required this always on DRM connection to their server. Also if indeed it was DDOS there is no excuse for them to not be prepared for it or mitigate it, any large size website nowadays has mitigated the DDOS attack by implementing technology designed to identify the DDOS attack packets and scrub them out of the traffic (i.e. Arbor Peakflow), this scrubbing results in higher latency to the site during the attack, but allows the application/server/site to stay available to customers. This type of DDOS mitigation is usually available as a service from the ISP provider or is also available as devices that can be installed on the hosting site. So I am not totally buying that this is a DDOS as opposed to covering up for poor capacity planning by Ubisoft, and if it is DDOS they also failed to plan for it despite throwing down the gauntlet against pirates that this DRM was foolproof. I bought SH5 knowing the annoyance and risks but hoping for the best, and so far I've lucked out that the DRM has been working when I needed to play, worst case if the DRM stops me from playing for long enough to bug me I will be justified in looking for alternative ways to play the game I paid for.