Minecraft Was In The Crosshairs Of The Largest DDoS Attack Cloudflare Has Ever Seen
This week, Cloudflare released a threat report detailing the state of distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in the third quarter of 2022. Cloudflare is a major provider of DDoS mitigation services, giving the company insight into the frequency, strength, and nature of DDoS attacks. The largest attack Cloudflare saw in Q3 2022 was targeted at a popular Minecraft server called Wynncraft. The server provides players with a complete massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) experience.
DDoS attacks bombard servers with an onslaught of incoming requests generated by a network of machines. The machines used in these attacks are usually compromised by threat actors and forced to cooperate in order to form what’s known as a botnet. Botnets can be thousands of machines strong, enabling the threat actors controlling these networks to launch DDoS attacks that suddenly slam targeted servers with tens of millions of requests per second. Some of the most formidable botnets are formed through the distribution of the Mirai botnet malware and its variants.
One such Marai botnet variant launched the DDoS attack on Wynncraft, which consisted of both UDP and TCP floods. This attack reached the highest bitrate Cloudflare has ever seen in a DDoS attack, peaking at 2.5 Terabits per second (Tbps). Fortunately for those playing Wynncraft at the time, Cloudflare was able to stop this attack from reaching the Minecraft server, meaning the attack had no effect on its target. The attack lasted a little over a minute before falling off, the threat actor presumably calling off the attack after determining that Cloudflare was blocking its intended impact.
However, not all gamers are as fortunate when it comes to DDoS attacks. Blizzard’s servers were recently hit by a mass DDoS attack at the launch of Overwatch 2, blocking players from logging into the game for hours on end. Blizzard employees had to scramble to mitigate this attack, making for a rocky launch of the game. The attack on Wynncraft shows that there’s definitely something to be said for outsourcing DDoS mitigation to a company like Cloudflare that deals with these sorts of attacks all the time.
However, not all gamers are as fortunate when it comes to DDoS attacks. Blizzard’s servers were recently hit by a mass DDoS attack at the launch of Overwatch 2, blocking players from logging into the game for hours on end. Blizzard employees had to scramble to mitigate this attack, making for a rocky launch of the game. The attack on Wynncraft shows that there’s definitely something to be said for outsourcing DDoS mitigation to a company like Cloudflare that deals with these sorts of attacks all the time.
