EVE General Discussion

I... what?

No. The point of a denial of service attack is to... well, deny service. That's the whole point of the vast majority of them - to simply cause a service interruption by rendering the system unreachable. They don't, generally, allow the attacker to access the system.

The DDoS and the vulnerability here are almost certainly related and perpetrated by the same group or individual, but are two distinct attacks.

This is what me and my peeps was talking about during the server downtime. Just wild guess from the limited info given to us from CCP. It was a good idea to pull the servers down and do a full analysis imo.

Better safe than sorry.

it's quite common to use a ddos in order to sneak by other malicious stuff - an IDS will often look for deviations from the statistical patterns of normal network traffic in order to spot intrusions (a ddos drowns out any meaningful patterns) or inspect individual packets (in which case a ddos might cause a poorly configured IDS to choke on all the traffic).

The attention of human staff is of course diverted as well while they are trying to deal with a ddos attack (which will cause delays in them sorting through and reacting to automated reports on potential intrusions).

the ddos is basically a massive smokescreen behind which the attacker is trying to hide his probing and/or intrusion.

I don't care who's responsible.

What I care about is that my personal information wasn't stolen thanks to CCP being on the ball.

That can't be said for the big boys, including Blizzard and Sony. Any accts I have with them are fake info on throw away email addys thanks to their pathetic past performance.

At this point, CCP is the only one I trust to protect my privacy.

Mr Epeen

There's probably a considerable number of server clusters accessible to varying degrees on the internet with equivalent or greater computing power.

A thread titled "So.. Who's Responsible?" and after two pages no-one has blamed the Goons yet?

I'm on the Eve Online forums right?

Did we lose the tin-foil rolls in the attack or something?

There seem to be a lot of misconceptions. Let me clear this up, considering I know how a DDoS works, and understand what CCP said in their post.

Someone found a vulnerability in CCP's servers. This doesn't mean they were able to gain access, or compromise the system. Vulnerabilities like that are pretty rare when you have a development team that knows what they're doing. Instead, what this most likely means, is they found a way to make CCP's servers do excessive amounts of work. They then either used a single computer, or multiple computers, to repeatedly send the data to CCP's servers that would make them do excessive amounts of work. This resulted in a Denial of Service.

Think of it in terms of a website, as it's a bit easier that way. Imagine you found a page on a website that took forever to load, and while loading slowed the entire website down. Now imagine if you had control of thousands of computers, and commanded all of those computers to request that page over and over again. The effect would be that the website would go offline under the load while trying to process all of those requests.

CCP took the servers offline to ensure no further vulnerabilities had been found/exploited. This is precautionary, and a smart move on their part. It doesn't mean the attacker actually gained any access though.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Pretty much this

The foil got nerfed.