DDOS Attacks - What, how, why?

[MelonDisrupt]

Hello,

It has become common knowledge that over the past few weeks, RPP has been subject to what we like to call DDOS attacks. These attacks simulate a lot of traffic (imagine thousands and thousands of people refreshing the page, every second!) and try to overwhelm our servers.

These attacks, usually cripple communities. Especially other GTA:V servers we've seen across the entire network. Unfortunately, these types of attacks are considered common in this space. If you've been around for a while, you'll know we had similar styles of attacks back on MTA!

You would assume, in this day and age we've grown up from this style of attack. However, they seem to continued anyway.

I wanted to provide some information on these attacks, as some people may find it interesting, plus in the purposes of transparency, we felt it was wise to disclose what we're doing, how we're doing it and how this wont impact you as a player!

 

We first began encountering DDOS attacks back during our testing phase, hitting some significant data hits, which at the time did cripple our services. At the time, during testing we felt no requirement to have a beefy server with protection, because well... it was a development server. During this time, we immediately migrated and moved over to OVH. OVH is considered a leader in dedicated servers, we have used them for past projects and ideas and knew we'd be okay with OVH.

Since moving to OVH, we've sustained a total of six attacks. These attacks lasted around 15 minutes, on each occasion. However impacted players for a total of 9 minutes over the six attacks, which is impressive.

OVH provides data to us, including vectors (the methods they use to try and DDOS) and we've been working with our development team to increase our security, endpoints and ensuring we're covering where we can.

 

Overall, our network has remained incredibly stable, thanks to OVH.

 

Yesterday, we sustained the largest attack, having a significant scope of attack on multiple vectors we've not seen before. Gradually, day by day we're seeing the same attack, attempt different vectors. We've patched a lot of these, as well as banning any of the IP's we've encountered during the attack.

I want to reassure the community, RPP, Phytoventures and the entire team behind what we do, take your security seriously. At no point have we lost data, been exposed to any form of other attacks, and we continuously process security audits weekly to ensure we remain secure for you, our community.

Furthermore, we are a member of the ICO. Should an incident occur where data is lost, we assure you we will co-operate with the ICO to report and accordingly be investigated to ensure we did everything we could, to protect your data.

We do anticipate these attacks to continue, however I want to stress the importance of blaming others. You shouldn't be blaming anyone for these attacks. The fact is, we'll probably never know who is behind the attacks, nor do we really care. Since the spawn of game servers, networks, etc - it's always been a problem, and luckily for us, we prepared for this. It is important to us that you do not go around, throwing accusations and remain respectful and considerate to others. It's not a witch hunt, and we appreciate how people may have theories, but they're not important to the development and growth of our server.

We will continue to monitor, protect and ensure the community grows as we expect over time.

Thank you for all of your support and look forward to seeing you in-game!