Actions should be taken to avoid DDoS attacks
In recent years, online gaming has become one of the three profitable industries on the Internet, with online finance and education being the other two. The development of online gaming has also played an important role in promoting the demand for IT talents. At the same time, it is crucial to provide a stable and reliable network and server for online game players.
With the increase of Internet bandwidth and the invention of various DDoS attacking tools, it has become easier and easier to perform DDoS attacks. DDoS attacks are on the rise. Being competitive, the online gaming industry is frequently targeted by DDoS attackers. Therefore, it is essential for gamers to learn how to protect themselves from DDoS attacks.
Suppose you are having fun in a popular online game, you suddenly get disconnected from the server and won’t reconnect it. How do you feel? You must be annoyed about failing to connect to the server.
In this article, we’ll talk about DDoS attacks and how to void them.
What are DDoS attacks?
DDoS attack, known as Distributed Denial of Service attack, is a common network attack method. DDoS attacks flood the targeted server with a good number of requests in a short time, which makes it unable to respond to normal requests.
For example, I run a small restaurant that can accommodate up to 20 people at a time. You can go to my restaurant, order and enjoy food.
However, my competitor sends 200 people to have dinner in my restaurant, which keeps me from running the restaurant normally. They disguise themselves as ordinary customers so that I can’t distinguish them from real customers. While real customers like you can’t get in to enjoy dinner.
This is the same for online games. Gameplayers are those who can’t get in for dinner.
How do DDoS attacks work?
A denial of services attack tries to stop the targeted server from providing service or resources. A distributed denial of service attack occurs when the server is attacked by many DoS attacks. Services and resources include disk space, storage and even network bandwidth.
In fact, the attack on network bandwidth is only a small part of the DoS attack. As long as it prevents the target from some services or crashes the host, it is called a denial of service attack.
DoS attacks are performed to achieve two goals:
- Overload the server and it will refuse new requests.
- Use IP spoofing to prevent legitimate users from connecting to the server.
Common methods to perform DDoS attacks
Distributed denial of service attacks combine multiple computers as botnets to attack one or more targets with the help of relevant technologies, which will greatly increase the power of the denial of services attack.
Generally, DDoS attacks aim at network bandwidth. In other words, a large number of attack packets cause network bandwidth to be blocked, while legitimate network packets are flooded by fake attack packets and cannot reach the host.
There are dozens of techniques to perform a DDoS attack, and new methods are still being invented. There are three basic DDOS attacks:
- SYN flood: It is the most effective method of DDoS attacks to kill network services of all kinds of systems. It exhausts the resources of the victim host or overload the host with the SYM or ACK packet of a lot of spoofed IP and source ports. It is difficult to trace back to the attacker because the IP addresses are faked.
- HTTP get flood: This kind of DDoS attack is designed to target scripts such as ASP, ISP, PHP and CGI. It features establishing normal TCP connections with the server and constantly submitting a GET or POST requests to the script. As a result, the server resources will be exhausted and refuse requests.
- UDP flood: UDP Flood is an increasingly popular DDoS attack. It often uses a large number of UDP packets to attack the DNS server, Radius authentication server and the streaming media video server. In UDP flood attacks, attackers can send a large number of faked IP addresses in small UDP packets.
How to avoid DDoS attacks?
There is no perfect way to completely protect yourself from DDoS attacks. But it does reduce the risks of being a victim of a DDoS attack if you take precautions. You can try the following methods to shield yourself from most potential DDoS attacks while gaming.
- Antivirus software
In addition to protecting your device from malware, antivirus or firewalls are also effective defenses against distributed denial of service attacks. This is a very effective method that helps you avoid getting caught in a DDoS attack from any game server you connect to.
Make sure you have installed a firewall and anti-virus software on your device before you enjoy playing online games. You should also check for updates regularly.
- Hide your IP address
Since the attacker targets you by your IP address, you can use security tools to hide your IP address. VPN, virtual private network, is recommended to do this for you. Once you connect to a VPN server, you will be assigned the VPN server’s IP address. While your real IP address is masked so that a DDoS attack can’t target you.
- Improve your home network
Choose a well-known and reputable router, especially one with built-in defenses. They can help you prevent distributed denial of service (DDoS) and other types of cyber attacks while playing the game.
Besides, you should never forget to update your hardware regularly to prevent bugs from being exploited.
