UPDATE: 11:45pm -7:00 GMT (Mountain Time)
We have been hit again from a new address. I am currently working to resolve the network issue. continued connection loss should last no more than 5 minutes. I appreciate everyone's patience in this matter.
I've attached a sampling graph below to show the loss of connectivity. Lasts roughly 15-30 seconds before we are able to blacklist the needed IP's and maintain stability. (for those of you interested)
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Yet again we have received a massive DDoS attack on our shard. We assume that people conducting these attacks are former (possibly banned) players who are unhappy with the existence of our shard. I want to let you all know that these attacks are fruitless as we report ALL DDoS attacks to the proper authorities, not only are the IP's logged but a full null trace route is conducted to provide as much information to the authorities as possible.
We are taking new preventative measures to stop these attacks. You can all rest assured that attacks on our shard will not go unpunished and I am usually able to mitigate them within a matter of minutes allowing you to continue playing unhindered.
Below is some information posted by our ISP/Dedicated Server Host right after the DDoS attack happened:
DDoS against a customer in Chicago
Sep 28 2013 07:16:47 PM PT A customer in Chicago was hit with an extremely large DDoS attack at approximately 9pm CDT tonight. This attack overwhelmed Internap's infrastructure in Chicago and caused heavy packet loss. The customer being hit has now been null-routed.
We ordered an upgrade in Chicago early this month to add another 10 Gbps circuit there, which should help with attacks like this one by spreading out the load among more Internap routers. We've been anxiously awaiting its installation and hope they complete it soon.
What is DDoS? (Distributed Denial of Service)In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of efforts to temporarily or indefinitely interrupt or suspend services of a host connected to the Internet.
Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and even root nameservers. This technique has now seen extensive use in certain games, used by server owners, or disgruntled competitors on games. Increasingly, DoS attacks have also been used as a form of resistance. DoS they say is a tool for registering dissent. Richard Stallman has stated that DoS is a form of 'Internet Street Protests’.The term is generally used relating to computer networks, but is not limited to this field; for example, it is also used in reference to CPU resource management.
Shard is safe to play once again.
