DDoS attacks. It’s a term that no one wanted to learn, but because even our hobbies, like going on social media, or playing online, is vulnerable to them, we have all ended up hearing and learning about it, one way or the other.
DDoS is short for distributed denial-of-service. We’ll make a very simplified analog here to the old casual game Diner Dash. As Flo, you had to go meet customers to seat them in your restaurant, serve them, give them their bills and take their payment. As you may remember, the longer you played Diner Dash, the more customers Flo had to entertain and manage.
If Flo experienced a DDoS at her restaurant, it would be like if she was forced to manage 1,000 customers all at once. And then Flo would suddenly face another batch of 1,000 customers seconds later, and then another batch after that, again and again. In the same way that the game ends if you fail to get to customers on time, DDoS attacks usually end with servers taken out, and that can ruin online services of all kinds from simple websites, to Facebook, to PSN.
As reported by GamesRadar, one such DDoS attack was perpetrated against a pretty ordinary Minecraft server called Minemen. But for whatever reason, this turned out to be one of the biggest DDoS attacks of all time.
A company called Global Secure Layer shared a public report on this attack, and made this determination. In terms of sheer volume, the biggest DDoS attack of all time remains the one that hit Google in September 2017. That attack reached a size of 2.54 Tbps.
However, this attack against Minemen, which happened just this week, struck at a rate of 3.2 to 3.5 times as much as the previous record holder. It is the largest DDoS attack if you measure it in terms of PPS, or packets per second.
The attack happened in August 25, after a test run the day before which reached 1.7 GPPS. The actual DDoS struck at a rate of 3.15 GPPS. Most of the attacks came from Russia, but they also came up from seventeen other countries, including Vietnam, South Korea, Taiwan, the US, and Ukraine.
As of now, we have no word on why this even happened. We can only speculate that maybe there was a disgruntled player who didn’t like some change that happened in Minemen’s servers? But maybe Minemen will talk about it themselves in time. If it turns out to be serious, we may end up hearing about it from Mojang, or even Microsoft. Hopefully, this all turns out to be a harmless prank from an above average hacker.
