Quote Originally Posted by Macleod View Post
Nah, if they really cared they'd be taking action against their crappy data center for not protecting themselves better. I've played plenty of other MMOs that had to deal with DDoS attacks, and guess what, none of them lasted for WEEKS. Things were usually fixed up and stable within a couple days at most.
Can some mitigating measures be taken? Sure. However, given how easy it is to proxy yourself, or even copy the IP address of other people accessing the game (as in legit players), including spoofing their MAC address (think hardware ID), plus how a lot of ISPs use dynamic IP assignment, you cannot failsafe it. Bear in mind there has been DDoS attacks that have taken down some of the biggest and strongest networks, and you'll see that if someone is determined enough, no amount of protection is going to stop it. And as people said, these services are available for hire, so someone disgruntled by the game can order a DDoS attack on the servers, and they could pay for say like 50 years of daily attacks if they wanted to. DDoS attacks are very sophisticated as they use botnets to attack a server (basically, think thousands of PCs all attacking a server at the same time, with different IPs etc).

Plus, if they're really determined, they can inject malicious code into SE's servers that when a player accesses it (say for example the login server), they get infected with that malicious code and their PC becomes a part of the botnet. PS4s are also susceptible to this if the malicious code is designed to exploit security flaws in the PS4. Trust me, it's a game of cat and mouse. Just gotta ride the storm and hope the person doesn't have an unending personal vendetta against Square Enix.