ULink DDos Attacks

[Gln]

So after some investigating it appears that the servers are receiving DDOS attacks. Not the usual, send loads of traffic at a server until it chokes and can’t take any more ddos attack. It kind of seems like someone is periodically grabbing the server list and attacking any occupied server with a bunch of empty packets.

http://osgamers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Z9vzOqe.png

 

We use a networking library called uLink. It works well for us. We can get 300 people on a single server. We’re happy. But it is not without its issues. I get the feeling that it’s not that widely used – so there’s a lot of relatively simple exploits that haven’t been found. We’ve reported issues. A lot. But always seem to receive the same responses. Basically – it’s going to be fixed in the future, in an update that is planned for the next month, that never really gets released.

http://osgamers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/96MN4oM.png

I’ve optimistically reported the latest issues to them, but we’re not that hopeful that we’ll get a timely fix. We’d love to take matters into our own hands but we can’t look into the issues and fix them ourselves because all their code is obfuscated.

So we’re stuck. We have to either convince them to fix the exploits for us, use a different networking library.. or write our own. This is something we have to have a long discussion about internally.

In the meantime we have to apologise for the ddos attacks. We know it’s not totally our fault – but at the same time it is. If you have exploits then people are going to exploit them. That’s just how the world works. We hope they get bored soon and everyone can get back to playing and we can get back to making. Until that happens we all have to suffer through this crap – which unfortunately we can do nothing but apologise for.