Who causes DDoS Attack and how to prevent it?

[Mature]

A genuine question as for the first time last night I noticed having large amount of freezing time , DC's and increased latency. It was awful.

Why are the servers getting these attacks and how do we prevent them? And who or what is causing them?

Sorry I'm not that technical. I rather ask to get more understanding of it and if theres anything I can do to avoid this?

[Kitfox]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

TL;DR: You can't do anything, it's up to the service provider to mitigate the attack.

[BigRed5392]

A genuine question as for the first time last night I noticed having large amount of freezing time , DC's and increased latency. It was awful.

Why are the servers getting these attacks and how do we prevent them? And who or what is causing them?

Sorry I'm not that technical. I rather ask to get more understanding of it and if theres anything I can do to avoid this?

trolls, wanna be hackers, hackers making a point, terrorists.

can't a ddos attack is spamming servers with fake logins so it shuts it down.

[Cakekizyy]

Doubt was DDoS. Servers were fine for me.

[LyraKuroneko]

Doubt was DDoS. Servers were fine for me.

Lodestone said it was DDoS. Not resolved thought.
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...a1b8fa37bd1bdc

[Jib]

My bullguard did give me a few warnings yesterday evening while playing ffxiv that I had never seen before - don’t remember the actual text now, something regarding network attack I think. Not sure if it is related with this or not

[Cakekizyy]

Lodestone said it was DDoS. Not resolved thought.
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...a1b8fa37bd1bdc

No wonder I didn't notice anything, different data center.

[Joe777]

No wonder I didn't notice anything, different data center.

Even if it was the same data center it is possible for some players to not experience the latency when others do. It basically impacts people at random. Severity of induced lag depends on how harsh the DDoS is. For example: one of my FC members got continuously DC'd and all I ever got was the occasional lag spike, and we were running PotD together.

[Ashbury]

Doubt was DDoS. Servers were fine for me.

It appears it wasn't targeted specifically at FFXIV. Comcast was having outages across the US yesterday. Affecting FFXIV specifically, it seens if your connection was routed through NTT, you were losing 60% of your packets.

That's why some people got affected, some weren't. If your connection weren't going through what was being DDOs, you were fine.

As for preventing, you pretty much can't because you can't pinpoint where the attack is coming through. You can try to block what appears to be an attack vector but you get a lot of false positives.