We are thrilled to announce new countermeasures to protect your Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto V (GTA 5) servers from the latest DDoS attack techniques as part of Gcore’s DDoS Protection service. Our transparent countermeasures are designed to address the specific DDoS technical challenges faced by TCP-based and UDP-based games, such as volumetric attacks, application-layer attacks, and botnet attacks. Read on to discover why these countermeasures are so important for Minecraft and GTA 5 servers.
What Are DDoS Countermeasures?
A countermeasure is a special element of a DDoS protection service that takes into account the features of servers of a specific game and addresses their vulnerabilities. It bolsters generic DDoS protection in ways specific to the demands of the game server(s) in question.
For example, in December 2022 when Minecraft servers worldwide suffered DDoS attacks that left millions of Minecraft players unable to log into the game. As a result of this and similar DDoS attacks:
- Gamers may suffer from login difficulties, game freezes, and frequent disconnections.
- Administrators may experience random flooding on non-game ports and targeted attacks such as TCP syn-floods and botnet connections on game ports.
DDoS Countermeasures Required for Minecraft and GTA 5 Servers
Let’s look at the specific needs of these two games and how Gcore’s countermeasures address such needs to stop DDoS attacks.
Minecraft Classic Countermeasures
Minecraft Classic is a TCP-based game and is vulnerable to attacks that exploit the TCP handshake process, such as TCP syn-flood attacks from spoofed IPs, out-of-state TCP attacks, and random packet floods.
Solution: We use TCP SYN cookie challenges for handshake validation and passive packet inspections to ensure compliance with game protocol. IP whitelisting restricts access to authorized users. For Bedrock editions, server query caching offloads these messages from the origin to the protection layer, improving server performance.
Grand Theft Auto V and Minecraft Bedrock Countermeasures
Like Minecraft Bedrock Edition, GTA 5 is mainly a UDP-based game and is prone to amplification attacks, random packet floods from spoofed IPs, and traffic replays from botnets.
Additionally, all games suffer from a group of game-specific attacks, such as server status queries and fake client connections, which exhaust server resources and lead to service denial.
Solution: Our GTA 5 protection offers temporary game server replacement during the ENet handshake, passive packet inspection to ensure protocol compliance, and IP whitelisting to permit only authorized connections.
Conclusion
Our new countermeasures for Minecraft and GTA 5 help to allow the game infrastructure to be fault tolerant. We ensure a safe and uninterrupted gaming experience for players, offering gaming companies the assurance of dependable, resilient operations. Our game server DDoS Protection is not limited to countermeasures for these two games; we have an impressive list of countermeasures tailored for popular online gaming titles.
Try Gcore DDoS Protection, trusted and endorsed by the global gaming community.
