Server Upgrades and/or Security Please!

[Hieral]

Sorry if I sound rude or something Hieral, not my intention, but you don\\'t know what a DDoS attack is. There\\'s hardly anything SE (or anyone, really) can do to defend against a DDoS atack. That\\'s why it\\'s such a popular tool to disrupt online services, because it\\'s almost impossible to defend against it. The only real way to fight it is getting more resources so they don\\'t get saturated by the DDoS... but if you do that, the attackers can just get more resources (usually more people) and that\\'s it, you\\'re back to the start and your service is still disrupted.

I don't claim to be a computer nerd by any means. In fact, the last time I used a computer for anything other than making a resume, Windows XP was a thing. That being said, from what research one can do online, it appears there's several methods of defense against this issue. The example you cited being one on a very long list.

Again, I'm no expert, hence the request to hire experts, but can't they just shut down all computer requests for access, single out the IPs spamming the network, firewall them, then restore computer access until the culprit is 100% blocked? Doesn't really seem possible to do on a console.

Unless it's being suggested that people can access the servers outside of the game client itself, which wouldn't make sense unless it was someone in SE doing it. If that's how it's happening, easily fixed I would think: shut down all requests coming from outside the client, add authorized IP addresses to permitted users, and firewall the rest.

Like I said, no expert but I understand the basics. I'm sure there's experts out there for hire who can isolate and fix it. Just a matter of SE being willing to hire them

[Kaedan]

I don't claim to be a computer nerd by any means. In fact, the last time I used a computer for anything other than making a resume, Windows XP was a thing. That being said, from what research one can do online, it appears there's several methods of defense against this issue. The example you cited being one on a very long list.

Again, I'm no expert, hence the request to hire experts, but can't they just shut down all computer requests for access, single out the IPs spamming the network, firewall them, then restore computer access until the culprit is 100% blocked? Doesn't really seem possible to do on a console.

Unless it's being suggested that people can access the servers outside of the game client itself, which wouldn't make sense unless it was someone in SE doing it. If that's how it's happening, easily fixed I would think: shut down all requests coming from outside the client, add authorized IP addresses to permitted users, and firewall the rest.

Like I said, no expert but I understand the basics. I'm sure there's experts out there for hire who can isolate and fix it. Just a matter of SE being willing to hire them

No, they cannot. As you admit, you're not an expert, and it's really easy for people who only understand something partially to think they have a solution.

IPs change constantly and DDoS attacks rely on literally hundreds and thousands of computers to attack the target... many of which might even be legit players who have contracted malware and are being used in the DDoS network.

To suggest they don't already have "experts" working on the problem is pretty insulting and defies common sense. They are doing what they can... throwing money at a problem doesn't magically fix it.

[Mmartins]

I don't claim to be a computer nerd by any means. In fact, the last time I used a computer for anything other than making a resume, Windows XP was a thing. That being said, from what research one can do online, it appears there's several methods of defense against this issue. The example you cited being one on a very long list.

Again, I'm no expert, hence the request to hire experts, but can't they just shut down all computer requests for access, single out the IPs spamming the network, firewall them, then restore computer access until the culprit is 100% blocked? Doesn't really seem possible to do on a console.

Unless it's being suggested that people can access the servers outside of the game client itself, which wouldn't make sense unless it was someone in SE doing it. If that's how it's happening, easily fixed I would think: shut down all requests coming from outside the client, add authorized IP addresses to permitted users, and firewall the rest.

Like I said, no expert but I understand the basics. I'm sure there's experts out there for hire who can isolate and fix it. Just a matter of SE being willing to hire them

As it happens, I'm not entirely an expert but I am a software engineer so I do know several things about DDoS attacks (having also studied them on my own from an engineer's perspective). As was commented by Kaedan and Paladinleeds, it's not as simple as you think. A DDoS is basically throwing requests at a server to saturate it's capacity to answer requests. You could see it as intentionally causing a bottleneck in a highway by getting a lot of cars to go to a certain point at the same time. If you make the highway bigger (get more resources to handle more requests), they just bring more cars. If you take their cars away, they just get different cars (IP addresses). If you put a checkpoint at any point before the congested one (your firewall block), they just gather before the checkpoint and now the checkpoint is the one saturated, which accomplishes the exact same thing.

It's a really tricky problem to solve and just googling it or throwing money away won't solve it. If it were that simple, it wouldn't be so widespread as a way to shut down services.