Minecraft Was In The Crosshairs Of The Largest DDoS Attack Cloudflare Has Ever Seen
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.
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.