Thoughts about Gaia based on yesterday DDOSing.

[Das Erlking]

Sins of an Angel

Lady Primrose

It would be kind of funny if Gaia wiped his inventory clean and unbanned him only to have him come back with nothing

Nah, if he was unbanned (which he won't be, trust me) he wouldn't care about starting with nothing. If he was committing fraud to get 6 trillion gold, or breaking into accounts/stealing passwords and items from accounts, he would likely get right back on the train and be back on top again in no time.

if that were the case however, why doesnt he simply just do it again and be more discreet? im playing devil's advocate for the sake of this argument but it seems like he could just make another account and do it all over again and be less stupid. dont get me wrong, the kids an idiot and deserved the ban but it seems like hes putting up a whole lot of fuss over nothing.

[Lady Saxophone]

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Your Neglected Sex Toy

As far as I get your point, I cannot fully relate real life to Gaia. And I don't understand the fact that "Gaia never thought there would be a reason that it could be ddosed" - it's a company, they have to think of all possibilities and try to gear up against them. You never know WHO and WHY is going to ddos the site, that's the problem, whether it's a typical crybaby who lost his account, or a specialised hacking group who could do not only ddosing but many more. This is a virtual software which has flaws, I know they are doing everything to bring us comfort of using the site without any problems, but they have to be on guard all the time no matter what. A software that fails can make people discouraged to use it.

But see, the point is "why even DDOS Gaia in the first place?"
It's like when the whole "Heartbleed" scare was going around -- there isn't much point in attacking Gaia. All financial transactions are handled off-site, it's not a government website or some top organization, and it's not a news or media website which gets tons of traffic each day by millions of people. Like you said though, there is always the unforeseen chance of a random person who would do it just to vent his anger... but this is the first time of such a thing occuring in what, 11 years?

Another point to mention is that DDOS attacks are still relatively new. From what I've found, most records indicate they only started about 3 years ago. Therefore, information about how to protect against them and methods for doing so are still being gathered and tested.

P.S. Gaia is a "website", not a "software" =w=;;

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[Elinoi]

Lady Primrose

Elinoi

DDoSS attacks are actually difficult to protect from. Even with best service to prevent it.

Its not like major companies haven't had issues with it in the past. I know in the past year theres been plenty of DDoSS attacks on major game companies as well. EA, Blizzard, RIOT, and I do believe Dota 2 was brought down several times as well.
And theres plenty of "normal" sites that suffer from attacks all the time.
Anyone who acts like its really easy to prevent has no idea what they are talking about.

^ Wonderful post, worth tipping. Like I mentioned earlier, from what a friend told me, there are companies that can redirect traffic for the sites that are being attacked but from what i hear it is really expensive, even then accomplishing these things is no walk in the park for companies and DDoSS attacks are simply a presence that will exist on the internet for a long long time. People mention Gaia changing their security but the reality is that these types of attacks dont require coding or different security scenarios because they are server targeted(correct me if i am wrong). Anyone who types in Gaiaonline.com can access their servers in effect. in any case these things are hard to prevent and manage

Correct, I think CloudFlare is considered the best in the business. But- ofc its very expensive. But DDoSS protection must evolve as fast as DDoSSers find new methods to bring down networks.

For example in the attacks mentioned on gaming companies they were made by the same group of kids. They used the computers inner clock to create massive amounts of signals to over load the servers like what had never been seen before.
These companies had DDoSS prevention, but it doesn't work as smoothly as many like to believe.
And DDoSSer's usually aren't the brightest bunch. not uncommon attacks land some of them in jail. ^ ^

[Your Neglected Sex Toy]

Elinoi

DDoSS attacks are actually difficult to protect from. Even with best service to prevent it.

Its not like major companies haven't had issues with it in the past. I know in the past year theres been plenty of DDoSS attacks on major game companies as well. EA, Blizzard, RIOT, and I do believe Dota 2 was brought down several times as well.
And theres plenty of "normal" sites that suffer from attacks all the time.
Anyone who acts like its really easy to prevent has no idea what they are talking about.

Well, I'm here to stand up for your last sentence, since I feel you actually wrote that in relation to my person - I'm not a simple user who knows nothing about ddosing and braggs about "omg gaia how can you not defend yourself from ddosing". I'm into the stuff and professional IT has been a part of my daily routine and life for a while now. I know it's not easy to protect yourself from mass ddos attack coming from powerful sources and networks, but if there's a person who says 'i'm a hacker and i can ddos the site' and he actually does it with (i don't know, but probably) common tools he owns, then it's kind of self-explanatory for me.
Well, that's my opinion, I know people may not agree, but some tend to speak about ddosing without having any basic knowledge about it, just like you said.

[Kronprinz Schwarzhaus]

A DDoS attack doesn't say anything about Gaia's servers or security. All it says is that there's someone out there with enough time to DDoS gaia. Coming to the conclusion that Gaia's security is poor would need a different kind of proof entirely. DDoSing is about flooding the servers completely or partially so that it cannot function and process other requests at all or efficiently (respectfully) -- now what kind of server security would exist that prevented users from sending requests? None. Because that would basically be blocking everyone. Every time something's done on Gaia, some part of this server is used in order to process said something-done's request. There's not a full-proof, expensive, super-server out there that can guarantee protection from DDoS; therefore, this is not a problem with Gaia. Many even larger websites have been victims of DDoS: WoW, EA. Hell, even small websites like Picorama fall victim of these things.

League of Legends suffered from a DDoS attack during the summer. How did they handle it? They jumped the police on it. It couldn't be fixed until those DDoSing the game stopped themselves or until the police found them. If DDoS attacks were as easy to fix as server upgrades, wouldn't one think that with ALL the money League of Legends reels in, Riot would have already invested into that? Food for thought.

It needs to be understood that even if there is some way found to protect against one type of DDoS attack, there are hundreds of other ways to go about DDoSing. Yeah. There's not just one way to do it. Fix one -- there's always going to be someone out there who finds another way. So anyone trying to pin this on Gaia saying that their servers are cheap and in need of updating -- understand all of the above first.

[Your Neglected Sex Toy]

Lady Saxophone

▧▧▧ ♬ ▧▧▧P.S. Gaia is a "website", not a "software" =w=;;

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I wrote it thinking about software that the site uses, sorry for misunderstanding. sweatdrop

[Das Erlking]

Tall Dark and Snarky

A DDoS attack doesn't say anything about Gaia's servers or security. All it says is that there's someone out there with enough time to DDoS gaia. DDoSing is about flooding the servers so that it cannot function and process other requests -- now what kind of server security would exist that prevented users from sending requests? None. Because that would basically be blocking everyone. Every time something's done on Gaia, some part of this server is used in order to process said something-done's request. There's not a full-proof, expensive, super-server out there that can guarantee protection from DDoS; therefore, this is not a problem with Gaia. Many even larger websites have been victims of DDoS: WoW, EA. Hell, even small websites like Picorama fall victim of these things.

League of Legends suffered from a DDoS attack during the summer. How did they handle it? They jumped the police on it. It couldn't be fixed until those DDoSing the game stopped themselves or until the police found them. If DDoS attacks were as easy to fix as server upgrades, wouldn't one think that with ALL the money League of Legends reels in, Riot would have already invested into that? Food for thought.

It needs to be understood that even if there is some way found to protect against one type of DDoS attack, there are hundreds of other ways to go about DDoSing. Yeah. There's not just one way to do it. Fix one -- there's always going to be someone out there who finds another way. So anyone trying to pin this on Gaia saying that their servers are cheap and in need of updating -- understand all of the above first.

Eli posted something similar above and im glad at least there are more sound minds like myself here to understand the situation. I am only tech savvy to an extent and dont know the workings of these things as well as others but i do understand what you and eli are saying about it so *thumbs up*

[Madam Ace]

Tall Dark and Snarky

A DDoS attack doesn't say anything about Gaia's servers or security. All it says is that there's someone out there with enough time to DDoS gaia. Coming to the conclusion that Gaia's security is poor would need a different kind of proof entirely. DDoSing is about flooding the servers completely or partially so that it cannot function and process other requests at all or efficiently (respectfully) -- now what kind of server security would exist that prevented users from sending requests? None. Because that would basically be blocking everyone. Every time something's done on Gaia, some part of this server is used in order to process said something-done's request. There's not a full-proof, expensive, super-server out there that can guarantee protection from DDoS; therefore, this is not a problem with Gaia. Many even larger websites have been victims of DDoS: WoW, EA. Hell, even small websites like Picorama fall victim of these things.

League of Legends suffered from a DDoS attack during the summer. How did they handle it? They jumped the police on it. It couldn't be fixed until those DDoSing the game stopped themselves or until the police found them. If DDoS attacks were as easy to fix as server upgrades, wouldn't one think that with ALL the money League of Legends reels in, Riot would have already invested into that? Food for thought.

It needs to be understood that even if there is some way found to protect against one type of DDoS attack, there are hundreds of other ways to go about DDoSing. Yeah. There's not just one way to do it. Fix one -- there's always going to be someone out there who finds another way. So anyone trying to pin this on Gaia saying that their servers are cheap and in need of updating -- understand all of the above first.

Thank you so much for putting into words what I couldn't.
Bottom line: There's no way to prevent DDoSing other than just shutting out everyone, which is the purpose of DDoS.
That... or have a mythically huge server that is impossible to overload.

[Elinoi]

Your Neglected Sex Toy

Elinoi

DDoSS attacks are actually difficult to protect from. Even with best service to prevent it.

Its not like major companies haven't had issues with it in the past. I know in the past year theres been plenty of DDoSS attacks on major game companies as well. EA, Blizzard, RIOT, and I do believe Dota 2 was brought down several times as well.
And theres plenty of "normal" sites that suffer from attacks all the time.
Anyone who acts like its really easy to prevent has no idea what they are talking about.

Well, I'm here to stand up for your last sentence, since I feel you actually wrote that in relation to my person - I'm not a simple user who knows nothing about ddosing and braggs about "omg gaia how can you not defend yourself from ddosing". I'm into the stuff and professional IT has been a part of my daily routine and life for a while now. I know it's not easy to protect yourself from mass ddos attack coming from powerful sources and networks, but if there's a person who says 'i'm a hacker and i can ddos the site' and he actually does it with (i don't know, but probably) common tools he owns, then it's kind of self-explanatory for me.
Well, that's my opinion, I know people may not agree, but some tend to speak about ddosing without having any basic knowledge about it, just like you said.

I wasn't necessarily talking about you, but as the OP.. I understand, as DDoSS is something that a lot of people feel is click of the button and whaalaaaaaaaaa ddoss protection !
When in fact it could be the other way around with how often ddossers turn out to be script kiddies who bought some servers to bring someone or something down at the push of a button.

Comment was rather because theres a lot of misconceptions about ddoss, and a lot of people simply don't get that ddoss protections not 100% and can't ever be expected to be.

[Night born of Raine]

Sand Dancer Shaka

One good thing to have come from it is that, for once, all users are united in solidarity.

Yeah we now hate azyzz who is now gloating on gaia's fb

[Lady Saxophone]

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Madam Ace

Bottom line: There's no way to prevent DDoSing other than just shutting out everyone, which is the purpose of DDoS.
That... or have a mythically huge server that is impossible to overload.

Or you could just shut down the IPs which are attacking, close ports, and other various things...
IBM (granted it's a giant company and can afford/make it's own protection) has multiple layers to protect against DDoS attacks.
It is "shutting out", but it doesn't need to be "everyone"

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[Jayce Reinhardt]

Your Neglected Sex Toy

Jayce Reinhardt

What security measures do other sites have against DDOS that Gaia doesn't?

Do you think that all of the sites use the same ddos protections? Clearly not, cause ddosing happens daily and is widely reported. There are many companies who are geared up with software which doesn't allow most of ddos attacks and even if it's "ddos conspiracy" running over in here and we don't know it yet (i hardly believe it's going to be admitted in any way since it could have the potential of making people hesitant to buying cash or even using the site knowing their accounts are not somewhat safe - not everyone knows what is ddosing, hence theories), I am rather hesitant that Gaia has best protections out there if a guy says "i'm gonna ddos the heck out of it" and then for half of the day the site is out, not to mention the effects we feel now.

That doesn't answer the question tho.

[Jayce Reinhardt]

Sunset Illu

It was definitely an attack and I know the person that did it.
I hope he knows what he is doing because this a very serious matter and he had absolutely no reason to do it.
Other than that, it's not really upsetting me as much as other gaians because lately this place has been pretty boring anyway.

The fact that he is actually wasting time and energy on this place is beyond sad.

[Scit]

Wren_Fritsche

Sand Dancer Shaka

One good thing to have come from it is that, for once, all users are united in solidarity.

Yeah we now hate azyzz who is now gloating on gaia's fb

I personally just hope it'll blow over sooner rather than later.
Too much attention to one person will just draw more people who will do the same thing for fun
I'm not confirming anything, but even if it's just speculation, this person managed to get a lot of attention.

[Evalinna]

Lady Primrose

P.S. If we were actually notified that it was in fact a DDOS because of some little kid raging about being banned, given proof or something, I would like to think that the community would join me in standing with Gaia every step of the way. They have always been zero tolerance about this stuff and I have never heard of reversing bans for anyone ever.

Besides the little crybaby clearly did something to get banned in the first place, they dont just pass those out (not as far as ive seen sweatdrop )

hell freaking yes!!!! I don't blame gaia at all, i may be a little disappointed in them right now, and kinda sad at how they've treated the community recently, but the DDOS attack was not their fault, even with the best protection in the world some little cry baby looser will find a way around all the firewalls and safe guards.

i hope gaia does come forward with a legit announcement (not a damn dev / staff notice) but a real honest to goodness announcement explaining what happened over the last 24-48 hours (or however long this will last.) I have this feeling that they won't come forward and explain what happened, or if they do it will have zero information in it......

~Eva