HoN Happenings - Stat Padding and DDoS Attacks

[Belisle]

So HoN has been down for 2 days. Its just now starting to kinda work again.

Since HoN tracks your stats, and gives you a player skill ranking that increases or decreases when you win or lose a game, people get pretty defensive about their Match Making Ranking or MMR. Apparently 3 douchebags decided it would be a good idea to use their botnet to crash the HoN servers any time they were about to lose a match, when the game crashes, their stats don't get recorded, and they don't lose any rank.

Well the S2 staff figures out what the fuck is going on and bans the douchebags. They didn't take too kindly to this and decided that if they can't play, no one can. The worst part is that these cats seem pretty smart about how they're doing it too, so conventional tactics aren't working too well.

Also, AFAIK, [S2]IAmRoot is their only network guy. This could take a while.



In b4 "This wouldn't happen on my xbox"

[Belisle]

For those not familiar with DDoS, this post combo from SA sums it up pretty well.

Christ it's still down?  How hard is to thwart a DDOS attack from some stats rager kid stupid enough to try it when S2 has all his account info?

Do you understand the details of a DDOS? You flood the server with almost-valid data so that either

• The networking stack on the servers halts
• Their bandwidth is all used up
• Everything gets choppy and shitty if somehow the first two don't happen.
• ALL OF THE ABOVE

The problem is that there are thousands of zombie computers that these stat rager kids have command of, and they are using them to blare data at S2. There's lots of ways to 'complicate' the attack itself, implementing randomization of the attack patterns and such so that the industry-grade DDOS protection walls can't reliably know what's valid and what's not based on heuristic analysis.

You're kind of forced to arrest them, black list that entire subnet (fast track to angry customers, not feasible depending on geographic distribution of the zombies), get the FBI involved, talk to all the ISPs of the offending IPs and get action (high effort, low return).

That is to say a DDOS is a DDOS, the profile of the people doing it have little to do with the difficulty in dealing with one.

[Mr. Hawkins]

So in order to rage quit to keep their stats, they had to DDOS the Gibson? That's dedication, holmes.

I thought HoN was being looked at for XBLA. Either way, this wouldn't happen on my xbox.  jkjkjk

[MrPharisee]

I hate rage quitters on so many levels... one, if you can't stand to lose, you don't deserve to win... but also, by having a consistent flood of rage quitters, when I suddenly drop from a match I'm losing because I have to shit, I have to leave for somewhere, or my internet crashes, it makes it look like I'M rage quitting. Totally not cool.

These guys are pussies of the highest calibur. "HURRR they caught us cheating and banned us THOSE PRICKS hurrr this will teach them to punish people who deserve it!"

[Belisle]

Yeah, pretty unfuckingbelieveable it looks like everything is back online and functioning now...but for how long?

[John Krueger]

About 10 minutes.