The biggest threat to Eorza isn’t the Garleans, or some other villain that I don’t want to look up because I haven’t even finished Heavensward yet. It’s Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which have been hitting Final Fantasy XIV since June and show no sign of stopping, according to the developers at Square Enix.
Square says that the DDoS attacks have grown more difficult to thwart over time, moving from Final Fantasy XIV’s servers to “upper-tier internet service providers” and leading to all sorts of server issues.
“Since mid-June, a third party has been targeting the Final Fantasy XIV game servers on the NA data center,” writes Square Enix today on the company’s website. “Until now, we have been implementing defensive measures at our own facilities to combat DDoS attacks against our Final Fantasy XIV game servers, and have been able to keep the impact to services at a minimum. However, since July the attacks have shifted away from the Final Fantasy XIV game servers and the target has changed to focus on the upper-tier internet service providers (ISPs) that are required to connect to the data center. These attacks to the upper-tier ISP network are causing lapses in communication to the game servers, giving rise to instant disconnects during logins.
“Because we can no longer combat the situation on our own, we have been in contact with the upper-tier ISPs, who have then been taking defensive measures sequentially on their end. This implementation has already been effective; however, there is the possibility that the attacks could occur again. Therefore, we will seek to strengthen our cooperation with the upper-tier ISPs and continue observing our defenses.”
DDoS attacks, which involve firing enormous amounts of data at a target in an attempt to clog its servers, are easy to perform and nearly impossible to stop. They also suck for just about everyone. More reading: