This week we look back at DDoS attacks that plagued competitive CS, and the one man who had enough.
Only a few months ago, one of the greatest dangers to the growth of the competitive scene was not a lack of interest from viewers, nor hacking among pros, but instead one of the unfortunate bi-products of CS:GO's lively betting community: DDoS attacks during matches.
DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service attacks, is a used used by many different types of people to overload a server or home connection to the internet to the point where it ceases to function. To do this, hackers, or in the case of CS:GO, upset bettors, get hold of a botnet, a network of infected computers that can be controlled a single person. They then have each computer in this bone-fide network spam requests to an IP, and depending on the size of the attacking botnet, this can almost instantly cripple the average players connection to the internet from their home.
What makes DDoS attacks so easy to carry out against CS:GO players is the fact that a attacker only needs to obtain the IP of player to begin with. And during the period between 2013 and early 2015, professionals took almost zero precautions to prevent their IP from being easily found. Using services like Skype or Teamspeak without any sort of proxy made it trivially easy for someone to get an IP from almost any person.
But the recipe wasn't complete without one key ingredient: the unregulated betting on CS:GO matches. If a person puts down $400 dollars on a team to win, they are most likely going to do anything they can to make sure that team wins, by any means necessary. And even though DDoS attacks are a felony in most countries, it's nearly impossible to trace back to a single attacker, as the botnet can contain an upwards of a thousand infected systems. Even with smaller bets, attacks against winning teams would still be carried out, and as a result, matches were often delayed for hours or even taken offline completely, played at an undisclosed time to prevent attackers from taking out players while in the match.
One of the players most infuriated by the constant delays and cancellation was Jaros?aw "pashaBiceps" Jarz?bkowski from Virtus.pro. In one of his signature rant videos, he expresses his annoyance with the people who carry them out:
Alongside the players, the constant DDoS caused anger among bettors that lost their money because of an unfair advantage caused by players being forced to drop from matches. After months of complaints and petitioning, players began to adopt more and more measures to protect their IPs. By the beginning of this year, the DDoS attacks began to peter out and today, the attacks are basically non-existent.
The previous edition of "The Weekly Flashback":
- VP vs LDLC and KQLY
- Olofmeister the Guardian Angel
- Boostgate
- Sneaky Snax
- Lonely ScreaM
- iBuyPower rising
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