>The Aisuru DDoS botnet operates as a DDoS-for-hire service with restricted clientele; operators have reportedly implemented preventive measures to avoid attacking governmental, law enforcement, military, and other national security properties. Most observed Aisuru attacks to date appear to be related to online gaming.
So why? Like why would someone pay to take a game down? I see this all over reddit with different games but I just don't get the point. What's the benefit of taking down an online game for a couple of hours.
Mad salt. Imagine a fully grown man having a toddler tantrum. "If I can't play/win/get my way, nobody can" type mentality. It's also a method of coercion. Give me mod status or I'll DDOS your server and destroy your community.
The other half comes from sever operators ddosing their competition. There is a lot of money to be made from paid cosmetics, ranks, moderator (demi-tyrant) status, etc on custom servers.
That's correct! You've correctly interpreted the document -- they had 324.5 B yen total sales. FF14 is on page 11, made 55.5B yen sales. and grew 8B yen yoy.
Ballpark math says you could sustain it for half an hour on Hetzner for $5k-$6k (only from 1500 IPs though), at least if your account didn't get banned first and you're halfway decent at network programming. I have no idea what a proper botnet like this costs though or how large the profit margins are.
Yeah I assume there's the initial startup cost of successfully managing to infect a large network of devices, and then the cost for any given use is likely "what customers will pay for it". If they are selecting out big money targets and focusing on gaming, I'm guessing the price isn't that high, but they also presumably know interesting a state actor in taking them down either by changing targets or bringing in enough money is bad for business.
The idea is, the botnets are in control of someone else. Who "owns" them. And some of those will rent "their property" for money, like they would legitimately own them.
Depends. The more the owners use their bots, or let others use their botnets, the more attention there is to them and the less useful the botnet is (either blacklisted IPs or owners noticing).
And a little bit of malicious bandwidth is easy to hide, a lot not. So there is a price to bandwith to the criminal owner.
back in '98 i got a 100mb per download limit for $100 on my cable connection. i recall getting DoS'd by someone cause i was a lpb barstard in quake tf. They were kind though, only DoS'd me 90mb as a warning.... Years later, TF2 is getting DoS'd into oblivion, an extorhted by DDoS for hire. Some things change, some things stay the same.
When I moderated a busy gaming forum long ago my most horrifying discovery was how many users I thought were children ... were very much "adults" by age.
It depends on the game, but for those with some kind of marketplace or transferable currency, I'm guessing market manipulation is one possible reason.
For other games, maybe trying to interrupt some time limited event or tournament. Going all the way down the rabbit hole, if you're not already familiar take a look at how crazy things get in a game like EVE: Online.
Then of course there are the bored trolls and/or people who feel wronged by the game's developers or other players.
> What's the benefit of taking down an online game for a couple of hours.
Competitive MMO. Imagine some event is setup to start at some time and your guild or alliance knows they're gonna lose it and the resource it gives: DDOS the server so it's down during the event so it does not run. Enjoy the fact you kept the asset linked to said event and sell the resources you get for real money.
If you've never played those kind of games you cannot fathom how cutthroat they can become. I'm part of a guild which has a specific intelligence branch with spies embedded in many other guilds and that's playing nice because we're not selling anything.
My online gaming days are basically non-existent the last decade, but seeing stuff like this makes me want to make my comeback. The funny and bizarre stories I have from WoW...
Probably it has to do with all the gambling sites associated with gaming not the games itself.
Taking a competitor offline for a few hours is a lot of money in a market business I expect.
there seems to be lot of weird stuff going on with gaming casinos the recent CoffeeZilla episode comes to mind, so wouldn’t be surprised if botnets are used
the ddos market has been somewhat centered around gaming for a while now, mainly to take down game server competition, or as an attempt to sell big players on "ddos protection" services.
during release one of the servers peaked at around 8gbps which is around 1000MiB/s which is $1/s which comes out to a - spits out coffee - 2.6million a month, seems perfectly reasonable?
I'm surprised no one has mentioned duping. Selling items and currency for real world money is big bucks and IME, server crashes reliably enable duping exploits.
Not saying that's the case in this particular incident though.
The results are very public, it's the same way IRC is often targeted. They're easy targets, thousands of users are affected and the results are immediately noticeable.
A satisfying theory for a lot of DDoS would be extortion or protection rackets. Pay up or we will DDoS you, or pay up or 'someone else' will DDoS you.
That's enough to explain it. But if you wanted to go more full shadowy conspiracy theory, someone arranged for a protection service that just so happens to work by giving some entity cleartext surveillance over much of the internet. Perhaps as a response to HTTPS everywhere being annoying.
I'm not suggesting that's the situation, but that it's the kind of possibility to keep in mind, intellectually, and it would be consistent with history.
> So why? Like why would someone pay to take a game down? I see this all over reddit with different games but I just don't get the point. What's the benefit of taking down an online game for a couple of hours.
Most of the time crime groups are running extortion campaigns, amplification campaigns, etc. For example, if a competitor can benefit from them being down you may be able to sell that. Eventually we will probably see the invention of crowd-funded randsomware, where everyone must submit one verification can of crypto to unlock the hacked game servers.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, this is literally what keeps happening to me. I run a couple private MMO servers, I regularly get hit with DDoS attacks and clowns like this guy DMing me to demand money to stop attacking my servers:
Misdirection. If I knock _you_ offline, its not going to be that difficult for you to put together a probable suspects list with me on it.
If it's going to cost me about the same in terms of resources to target you and a bunch of other people colocated with you, it's a bit less obvious who launched it and why.
You have a Minecraft server. You generate money from it (selling VIP packages, et cetera). You could generate more money if you had more players. You can have more players if you consistently DDoS other more popular servers; the experience for these players will be horrible and they might give your server a chance.
It may be for market manipulation. It may be extortion against the owning company. It may even be to take down a rival online game for a while.
I don't expect the big publisher games like PUBG to attack each other with DDoS attacks, but casino games? Or even sleazy Minecraft servers? I can totally see it.
Uh I used to get DDoSed by “booter” services whenever I would login to one of my Skype accounts. The script kiddie scene is that petty. In the private server scene one guy would DDoS competing servers that way everyone would funnel to his own.
>The Aisuru DDoS botnet operates as a DDoS-for-hire service with restricted clientele; operators have reportedly implemented preventive measures to avoid attacking governmental, law enforcement, military, and other national security properties. Most observed Aisuru attacks to date appear to be related to online gaming.
https://www.netscout.com/blog/asert/asert-threat-summary-ais...
So why? Like why would someone pay to take a game down? I see this all over reddit with different games but I just don't get the point. What's the benefit of taking down an online game for a couple of hours.