DDoS attacks (GvG mAT issues?)

For people that haven't heard there is a link to an image that looks like an imageshack link which takes record of your I.P. Once the "Serbs" have that, somehow they are able to know whose IP is whose and disconnect players at their will via a DDoS attack.

With that brief overview and some wiki'ing of DDoS you are probably curious where this is taking place.
Earlier this week an unknown guild Dont Mess With The Serbian [Don] won the highly competitive American aT. The reason behind this was due to dc's. Little did anyone know the dc's were caused by those players.

I know the first round of bans have come about, however with the mAT tomorrow, they can still decide indirectly who wins what match and ultimately receives the coveted May Gold Trim.

I figured I would post this here because of known presence of Guild Wars I live team on this subforum and if/what/how they are addressing this.

Restart your routers, change your IP adresses. Keep fingers crossed that keeps them off your tail...

That is wild...
Forcing DC's to win Tournament reward points?
People step to some pretty low levels to win stupid stuff.

And btw, these people would have much better success if they, say, I don't know, did something useful with their skills and disconnect anyone who tries to upload Justin Bieber to youtube.

Yea I have noticed this too while watching on obs. Their mesmer is also reliably interrupting fast-casted skills.

This goes way beyond botting, these are illegal activities in most countries.
I hope ANET can adress these issues and perma ban everyone in this guild, and every IP adress that was in it.
These players should never ever be allowed to play guildwars again, neither on secondary accounts.
It is very dangerous to have such players messing around with other people's connections.

This is interesting....
Im more interested as to how these people are going about getting a hold of these individual IP's
More info regarding DDOs for those who do not know about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

From what I've heard, they got the top players IP's by sending them a URL with an image of a necro in RA.

The only trouble with that plan is that if these guys are good enough to do the stuff cited, an IP ban would be nothing to them. :/

Agreed with the above. These perpetrator's are probably reading this and having a blast.

I actually said this very thing in ally chat....I figured it would be how the obtain'd them.....
Either way, Cheating in a game I can careless when your doing it on ur own closed system .......but when you take it online and influence other players gaming experience You have taken it to far.

Yep, they sent it out to all of us and they would name the image after our name so they could track when we accessed it, for me it was /happy, etc.

Anet is dealing with the guild but I would recommend all affected to take the needed precautions.

OP explained it. The image is on a server that they own/control. When someone views it, they have to download it first, and that leaves a record in the server logs. The tricky part is getting the person to view the image in the first place. Just posting it on forums or something will not tell you if the desired person saw it. You'd have to do a forum PM or e-mail directed to the one person whose IP you want to learn. So, there's a clue as to who's doing it and how to protect yourself: personal communications from unknown Serbians should be deleted unread (and possibly reported to a-net and/or local authorities if they care about minor cybercrime).

(Now if only I could convince Taurun that this situation is marginally but unequivocally better than simply telling the Serbian your IP, that would settle a different, slightly related, argument...)

Actually in webhosting ( or to say having your own website ) a visitor doesnt even have to download anything - when a person visits the website their ip can be found so easily via cpanel etc.
Im not going into details but anyone who have done thier on website , used cpanel etc will follow what i mean and if you look at me all i am in comparison to a hacker is im nothing - i only know a lil bit of webhosting etc and thats the end of what i know.But getting the ips is even possible for me because theres so many simple ways without going into the realms of hackers and ip sniffers etc.

Its sad where theres a game for enjoyment and theres people who seem to have the intelligence to hack but seem to lack intelligence to be able to play the game at all without hacking.

When someone visits a website, that means they ARE downloading something - that is, the website itself. That's the reason cpanel etc. have a record of them: because they downloaded the HTML (or other) file of the website to their computer.

The logical step is for someone with thourough knowledge of this to set up a stickied thread on how to possibly protect yourself against it. Change IP etc.

There are alot more interesting ways to get people's IP's than through some image link. QQ forums, for example, would be an enormous database containing pretty much every top GvG player's IP from their latest posting.

The fact they're using the image method makes me believe they themselves haven't got a clue what they're doing, and just followed the first "How to DDoS someone" guide on the internet.

As for protecting yourself against it:

There is some protection you can take (afaik) by shutting down certain microsoft service and closing ports, but if it were that easy, major websites wouldn't get ddos'd.

In other words: there isn't a waterproof protection against ddos'ing, if there were it wouldn't be such a widely known phenomena.

Apparently some people affected by this have changed their IP's and still have been getting DoS. Also, A.Net apparently banned them but they came back with a new guild, and new accounts. Also, some players who clicked their link claim to have been banned as well. So apparently changing your IP address doesn't work, banning them hasn't kept them away, and A.Net has been consistent with banning innocent players who were victims to this attack.

Do people really have this terrible of a social life that they have to attack other people just to win in a 6 year old game?

This is BS i have played them manny times and beat them a few. They have a mes bot but this DC seems to go a bit far, it was very common for teams to not make it into AT's because there is a very short connection time out to aviod cheating. sorry but this is just you sulking after being beating or losing...

If it was all nonsense, then why would arenanet ban them all?
I'm sure anet went trough chatlogs etc to see what was going on.
They won't just randomly perma people.

Yes, I know there were some innocents hit with the ban because they linked the url to others.

Ddos attacks during the mAT continued. At least 2 players were dc'ed in the first round due to it.