I have a Question about DDOS attacks

[LineageRazor]

But, my main point is: I know their ISP is getting attacked. If their ISP can't keep their own stuff secure, then SE should CHANGE THEIR ISP. When the company that my old store's point of sale system went through changed a policy, making it more difficult to process a credit card charge, we didn't just sit on it and tell our VERY ANGRY customers "It's not our fault". WE CHANGED OUR PROVIDER! Yeah, it was a learning curve, but we did it, and we were GLAD we did.

I'm not sure what you mean by keeping stuff secure. There's no way to "secure" against a DDOS attack, other than by having such a ridiculously massive infrastructure that you can process ALL of the incoming messages. There's no way to tell the difference between incoming DDOS messages and legitimate customer messages - they all need to be processed. This is why entities like Google and Amazon are pretty much the only institutions in the world that are pointless to DDOS. They're built from the ground up to handle a level of traffic that makes a DDOS attack look like a trickle.

For a companies like Sony or SE to be DDOS-proof, they'd need lots of hardware, expensive both to acquire and to maintain, that would be totally pointless 99% of the time. It's wasted space unless they're actively under attack, and since attacks are rare, it's an extremely poor investment. Bear in mind, too, that WE would be the ones paying for all this mostly-useless hardware; subscriptions would skyrocket in price. And worse, all that infrastructure is pointless if the DDOS strikes someplace out of their reach. If the targets are not SE themselves, but some other place on the route between the data center and your computer, there's nothing SE can do even if they're equipped to deal with DDOS themselves.

No, right now there's just one method for dealing with DDOS, and that's to wait for it to blow over. So far, it's worked without fail; no DDOS-er keeps it up forever. The best you as a player can do is promise yourself that if you ever meet a DDOS-er in person, you'll punch them in the face.

[tdb]

And worse, all that infrastructure is pointless if the DDOS strikes someplace out of their reach. If the targets are not SE themselves, but some other place on the route between the data center and your computer, there's nothing SE can do even if they're equipped to deal with DDOS themselves.

Based on what I've seen, this is likely the case. A week or two ago some of my friends were unable to get into the game and another had serious lag issues and kept getting disconnected. Meanwhile I had no issues. Last night the login issue hit me and it took 10+ attempts to get it. Once I did get in the game worked just fine though. Those same friends reported they had no problems whatsoever. If the attack was targeting SE's data center everyone would have problems; if it was targeting me I would have problems with everything. Since neither of those was the case it stands to reason that some router in the middle was affected.