DDoS at Launch

[Zoreyai]

I was going to take the day off like I did last time at Wod, but this time I'll take the day off 3 days after launch I thnk.

[A dot Ham]

If there is a DDoS they will do it during high population times. So around 6 PM America (and w/e the peak time is) and friday/weekends.

Thank you Ms. Cleo. The purpose of the attacks is to inconvenience people. After work launch day is annoying... but hardly an inconvenience. If hackers really wanted to piss people off it would start at midnight and not let up until the afternoon to piss of all those folks that take off from work to rush through content.

[Slirith]

*shrug* Even if WoW is DDoSed by basement dwelling incest babies, I have other games I can play that doesn't require battle.net

[Target2]

sure hope not

[Tharkkun]

Except it's quite hard to find the difference between heavy traffic and being DDOS'd. After a while they might find some connections that are DDOSing but it still takes a while, and it's not something you can prevent.

It's a night and day difference. WOD launch issues were caused by server loads caused by millions of people accessing their servers. The last ddos after the overwatch ban was a 205 GBPS attack. It's pretty easy to identify the sources when you're being flooded by thousands of packets per second by the same ip addresses even if its hundreds of thousands. A human can't press reconnect that fast.

[Arewn]

orly?

so if 99% of all players in the world arranged to log in at the same time to each game they own, what would you call that? shits and giggles stress testing? what about the 1%?

the ddos wouldnt be measured in time, since logging activities would take a pathetic amount of time..... unless....authenticators... have you noticed how long you can leave the log in request hanging?

you call it poorly managed, but very few companies are going to account for 100% utilization of resources at any given point - its not a good practice from an economic stand point unless the service deems it necessary.... and blizz service has ZERO SLA agreements between provider and users

Your post is sporadic and difficult to respond to. There's frankly a lot of nonsense packed into it. So I'll just answer each piece as best I can:
Ya rly

Depends why they organized such a thing. If they were doing it just to be jerks and push the servers, you could categorize that as an attack. If 99% of users just felt like logging in to play, then the network would simply be busy. I would call it "being over capacity". That doesn't mean it's a DDOS attack though. You can be busy without it being an attack.

The "measured in time" part is just drivel.

A lot more misplaced drivel here, but I'll point out that I did not call anyone's service poorly managed. I said that a network, any network, which is suffering from these symptoms but which is not suffering them as the result of an attack is simply overcapacity (congested) or has some component of the network being poorly managed/made (for example, the network infrastructure isn't built in such a way as to handle a particular amount of traffic). This wasn't a criticism, I was just pointing out the difference between a DDOS attack and a busy network. Ones the result of legitimate traffic, the other the result of a malicious attack.

If your capacity is 500 players, and you have 1000 trying to log in to play, that is not a D/DOS attack. That's just being busy. Your network is over capacity. It's congested. Your login servers are bottle-necking. You have heavy traffic. w.e. The point is, it is not a DDOS attack.

[wowaccounttom]

Your post is sporadic and difficult to respond to. There's frankly a lot of nonsense packed into it. So I'll just answer each piece as best I can:
Ya rly
If 99% of users just felt like logging in to play, then the network would simply be busy. I would call it "being over capacity". though.
.

mmmm i think your post is full of interwebz definitions ... ya rly rly... you can really tell because you seem to have trouble with basic concepts or understand industry definitions.

being over capacity = not enough resources.... because again, very few companies plan for worst case scenarios.

if an organized attack is launched to achieve this, thats called ddos as it taxes devices and prevents "normal" or "higher than expected" services to be deployed.

NOWHERE, not even in dumb wikipedia definitions does it say that it must be with malicious intent behind it.. .hence why 20 million authentications in a matter of seconds would tax more than one good system... as packets arrive to the destination, smaller routing devices would crap out and the bottleneck would begin....mitigating controls will ensure most of those requests go through or are queued but not 100% for blizz...

self inflicted dos like attacks due to poor planning are a real thing in the industry.. known and trusted devices in a network can crap out entire zones via dos (not ddos) like attacks thanks to simple misconfigurations. -- you never hear about them because large companies never talk about them unless stakeholders or pci requirements mandate them to do so.

something something...

FUCK.. overwatch season is over. freaking quickplay sucks

[Feral Druid ist Op]

They DDOSED EU last week and they will on launch this for 99% sure

[MrExcelion]

yeah im not planning on playing at midnight, next morning prolly

[nsgid]

so i was thinking about taking some days off from for a few days to level a couple characters to 100. the days i was considering was wed-fri, but with all the people logging on/"ddos" attacks that are supposedly happening, would it be better to take thurs/friday off? any input would be awesoem so i can figure my shit out lol

[Kuthe]

I'm certainly expecting DDoSing to happen. There was screenshots off a hacking-forum where people said they'd be organizing DDoSing on Legion launch in retaliation to being banned for hacking on Overwatch.
My sub runs out in a couple of days, and because of the typical server issues, and likelihood DDoSing happens, I'm going to stay away for a couple of days until it seems clear, instead of wasting money.

[MatthewOU2015]

I hope not. If so the DDOSers should face jail time. Enough with that billshit. Get the FBI to do magic and find them so they can be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

[Phookah]

Lizardsquad will probably be out in full force for the launch.

Lizard Squad is in ass-pounding federal prison. At least a handful of the members are, the new cool script kiddies on the block are "poodlecorp" or some stupid shit like that.

[normiegonnanorm]

DDoS is an excuse and may be done by blizzard themselves just to show off problems that can't be resolved by them.

[delus]

DDoS Attack =//= Players Logging in.. NOT Really the same..


The unplayable time during Expansions has been because of bottlenecks created by blizzard.. and a fried login server.

DDOS attacks are best placed during times of high activity.

[Arewn]

mmmm i think your post is full of interwebz definitions ... ya rly rly... you can really tell because you seem to have trouble with basic concepts or understand industry definitions.

being over capacity = not enough resources.... because again, very few companies plan for worst case scenarios.

if an organized attack is launched to achieve this, thats called ddos as it taxes devices and prevents "normal" or "higher than expected" services to be deployed.

NOWHERE, not even in dumb wikipedia definitions does it say that it must be with malicious intent behind it.. .hence why 20 million authentications in a matter of seconds would tax more than one good system... as packets arrive to the destination, smaller routing devices would crap out and the bottleneck would begin....mitigating controls will ensure most of those requests go through or are queued but not 100% for blizz...

self inflicted dos like attacks due to poor planning are a real thing in the industry.. known and trusted devices in a network can crap out entire zones via dos (not ddos) like attacks thanks to simple misconfigurations. -- you never hear about them because large companies never talk about them unless stakeholders or pci requirements mandate them to do so.

something something...

FUCK.. overwatch season is over. freaking quickplay sucks

You're hard to understand and sporadic, so I'll continue responding paragraph-by-paragraph:

I'm a network engineering graduate. I'm not using "interwebz" definitions, I'm using industry definitions.

Yes, like I said, that is what overcapacity is. Your claim about planning is nebulous and questionable. There are many industry standard practices which I would characterize as being "in preparation for worst case scenarios". Things like backups and all sorts of redundancies are in place precisely for worst case scenarios. Companies don't drop big bucks on raid and redundant cabling for fun.
Though I agree its not uncommon for it to get neglected.

Gotta highlight this if an organized attack is launched to achieve this, thats called ddos. This is what I have been saying. A DOS is not legitimate user traffic. Its an explicit attack with intent to interrupt service.

Go read the definition of malicious. Also, read the thing I just bolded above.
And I decided to google "ddos" just to check. One of the first things I found: "A denial of service (DoS) attack is a malicious attempt to make a server or a network resource unavailable to users".

EXACTLY. Look what you just typed. "dos like". Not dos. "like" dos. These are not DOS attacks, they are DOS-like events caused by poor management of your network (and simple misconfigurations is an example of exactly what I mean by "poor management").

something something...

Yes it does.

[Servasus]

DDoS Attack =//= Players Logging in.. NOT Really the same..


The unplayable time during Expansions has been because of bottlenecks created by blizzard.. and a fried login server.

You probably should educated yourself a little more. There absolutely was a 100% DDoS attack when WoD launched that came from China.

- - - Updated - - -

As if Blizz wouldn't lie.

There are websites that track DDoS attacks. They don't lie, and during WoD's launch, as I said, there was a 100% confirmed DDoS that came from China.

- - - Updated - - -

WoD had nothing to do with DDoS. It was unplayable simply because the lack of hardware. Blizzard didn't expect that amount of players to be online at the same time.

No, this is incorrect. You guys look so stupid right now it's insane.

[FelPlague]

There'll be lag for sure from the amount of people joining.

Now as for DDOS, I hope blizzard has learned something from all the DDOS over the last 2 months and upped their security to tell the difference between actual people connecting and attacks.

Another thing to take into account is that blizzard now has HotS and OW too, so during launch they might have less players so Blizz might temporarily take some of that server space, if their server architecture supports easy swapping like that

even pornhub, twitter, spotify, gta online, pso, etc, have all been brought down by ddos.. its not simply just "upp sercruity"

[alemaite]

The Overwatch launch was the absolute smoothest launch of a hyped game I have evern seen. Literally no problems at all, there was more chaos in new seasons in Diablo 3. Maybe Blizzard have prepared something similar for Legion, just maybe ...

[Vakna]

You can't stop a DDOS. There's no extra security they can put in place to stop the script kiddies who think they're real hackers.

Of course you can, it's just prohibitively expensive in both technical resources and money to have such extreme safeguards in place for something that 'might' happen. DDoS attacks are just a network of computers or 'botnet' being hijacked to flood Blizzard's servers with requests for junk information, you can identify such an attack and filter out the requests, but the tech to do so is so prohibitively expensive and difficult to implement it's just not worth it.