Recently, Gameforge and the MMORPG Aion Classic faced DDoS attacks and released a statement on Friday. Gameforge suspects criminal intentions behind the attacks. What the publisher is doing about it, you can find out here.
What is Aion Classic? With Aion Classic, you can enjoy the MMORPG in the version 1.9 and the subsequent bug fixes. This allows you to play content up to level 50. This includes flying in the open world, several dungeons, rifts, and PvP mayhem in the Abyss. More information about the MMORPG can be found here.
Check out the trailer for the EU release of Aion Classic here.
How was Aion Classic attacked? The servers of Aion Classic were hit by DDoS attacks in several waves. A DDoS attack refers to Distributed-Denial-of-Service
, which means planned denial of service. DDoS is seen as a tool of cybercrime.
In doing so, usually infected computers (bots) in a so-called botnet are misused in advance to send requests to the MMORPG servers. This happens in such a high number and volume that the servers malfunction in processing, and could possibly provide access to additional data. In the worst case, the servers could collapse under the load.
In DDoS attacks, the requests from player clients can hardly be considered, which manifests in the connection issues reported by players (via Gameforge).
The exact motive currently seems unclear. Gameforge claims, however, that criminal activities are hidden behind it.
What is Gameforge doing against the DDoS attacks? Drestam, the community manager in Gameforge’s forum, explains what the publisher has done about it:
We have implemented protection mechanisms, have a dedicated security team, and continue to work with external partners as well as service providers.
Statement from Drestam, Community Manager – Forum for Aion (via Gameforge)
How exactly these protection measures work has not been explained by Gameforge. Essentially, it requires protection in the form of intermediary proxy software or proxy servers that filter requests and only allow legitimate requests through to the servers.
However, this requires a high bandwidth to process several tens of thousands (or more) requests (via security-insider.de).
