Well, that's depressing

[prog]

Wired reports that unscrupulous players now have the power to disrupt online multiplayer Xbox games by DDoSing individual players. It's possible thanks to some new tools that make it easy to get the IPs of the people you're playing an Xbox game with, rent a slice of botnet time, and willfully firehose the former with the latter.

I didn't know this until just now, playing an otherwise delightful game of TF2 with lediva and a pile of anonymous members-of-public. Playing on defense, we both found our connections had become unusably choppy moments before our opponents' raiding party showed up, time and again - how curious. I was blown clear off the server at one point. Ms. Diva suspected the likely culprit, and forwarded me the article link even as we soldiered on. (We still managed to win, but jeez.)

As far as I know, there's no practical way to defend against this, or even react using the system's reputation tools, other than blanket-voting-down every member of an opposing team - it's impossible to know which of them threw the DDoS at you. This is a real bummer, and rather a wet blanket on the idea that NXE's friends-only chat channel would let you play with strangers online without being exposed to idiocy. Boy if only there were some way to easily gather a group of non-strangers to play together and etc. etc.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Grrr script kiddies grr.

[roboknee.livejournal.com]

This is why our society will fail. Kids don't know how to accept failure these days, so they'll go out and buy wins. Except in this case, since you still won. Good job! You cost them $60 bucks to still lose! It's like steroids for baseball players. They will pay for an advantage or a shortcut instead of practicing to get better or accepting that they're not as special as their parents told them they were.

Okay, rant over. And again, good job on trouncing the bastards.