A call to (nerdy) arms

[rickjames]

There are two potential effects:

A) There is a socket connection and the server is requested to perform some sort of task (i.e. login) This taxes the servers process resources.

B) Its mostly dropped trash traffic (ICMP flood etc.) and overwhelms network equipment.


Scenario B is mitigated by over-provisioning bandwidth usually. Scenario A is much more difficult to respond to unless a solution is developed to trust connections sources and therefore drop packets before they reach the server.

Regardless, to fix the problem by throwing money at it is unlikely to be very efficient or effective.

Now one potential theory I had (im a receptionist at an IT firm too) is that they may be abusing socket connections to the webserver (spam HTTP requests) as it seems the website goes down (colocated/same box/same VM) with the game server. If someone would be able to confirm or refute this, i would be willing to pony up a little cash to help get the website/forums hosted on a separate instance to mitigate that vulnerability.