Like almost every year in the period before Christmas, malicious people attack our server. Even this year is not an exception and from the logs about access to the database of characters and on the server page you can see the increased activity of just these individuals. Some players may have experienced a stronger or unusually long response from the server in recent days. Even though we don’t harm anyone, provide free entertainment for people and share almost all repairs with the community, there are still many ungrateful and evil people. They don’t do that much damage on their own, but most of the time they have contacts with individuals who are capable of it. The strongest attacks for us are usually so-called DDoS attacks, i.e. Distributed Denial of Service, i.e. the technique of attacking Internet services or sites, in which requests are swallowed and dropped or at least inoperable and unavailable to other users. In short, someone will send several thousand and sometimes even millions! requests for a particular service, overloads it and, as a rule, is unavailable.
These attacks are the most common and most threatening because we cannot defend against them. This overload leads to the latency of the entire server and attempts to meet all requirements in milliseconds. There are other attacks and much worse ones, such as logging directly to the server and others. Our experience from previous years, professional books that I once studied and several layers of protection provide us with maximum protection of the entire server. Thanks to them, in previous cases, when the server was overloaded, the server managed relatively well, for example, that it did not fall, the latency was momentary and the server got rid of it after a time without my intervention. Over the years, I’ve come up with other protections I’ve put on over the past few days. The server immediately rejects the given commands, checks them and, if necessary, immediately blocks them. So we are now at almost the highest possible level of security I am able to provide to the server, and we will hope to survive this period without the players being able to notice. As I watched at the peak yesterday, everything was going well and despite the attacks, there was nothing to know on the server.
However, it is worth remembering that we do not have the resources to have one server purely for websites, another just for the server, another for TeamSpeak and other services. Therefore, if someone manages to get through these layered protections, it is not always possible to immediately and effectively defend them, but we do our best. Even though we are a relatively small server, attacks are becoming more frequent, even hundreds of times a day at certain times and mostly at peak times, in order to harm as many innocent people as possible who are just looking for fun. These attackers cannot be understood and only need to be defended, so together let us hope that our tough protections will help us in the fight.
PS: This month will probably not be a cleanup due to upcoming new services and other planned events.
Repairs
10.11.2011 – 00:01
1) Added new protection to the server against attacks
2) Spirit Healers now not seen in BG
3) Fixed service resets exactly by site after time change
4) Fixed Heart of the Crusader
5) Fixed Judgements of the Just
6) Added new data to closed instances
12.11.2011 – 12:00
7) Adjusted exotic pet size - sometimes it was wrong almost 3x instead of 2x
8) Adjusted system of autocast of spells in petitions - first part
9) Fixed looting of objects in instances
10) Fixed other server crashes
11) Fixed usage The RP-GG Wintergrasp
12) Maybe fixed the mount if the player is on the mount
13) Fixed double reset times in some cases
14) Maybe fixed strange walking NPC in Dalaran occasionally
12.11.2011 – 22:15
15) Fixed handling of Mergo runes with Trinity
16) Fixed Warrior T10 4P bonus
17) Added control to Dalaran Sewers arena even during waterfall
18) Toravon Equip Repair
19) Fixed better yesterday's crash at the player's logout in WG
20) Added additional protection against attackers
12.11.2011 – 23:45
21) Fixed last server crashes from this week
22) Fixed Rogue T10 2P/4P bonus
23) Fixed PVP during Mind Control (test)
24) Added debug information for parts of the code that can cause crashes - these interventions should reveal the causes of the last server crash that bothers us, it is possible that the server will fall more often, but it is in the interest of their fixes
25) Dragon's Breath now doesn't share diminishing with Polymorph
13.11.2011 – 14:45
26) Fixed Fall in Obsidian Sanctum Instance
27) Fixed server crash when handling corpses
28) Removed additional debug information, the server should be stable
29) Fixed Hunter T9 4P bonus
30) Added more protection against attackers
14.11.2011 – 20:05
31) Added last protection against attacks
32) When checking the activity of the server and its peak load, the Wintergrasp area always occupied in the early evening and during the battle at the beginning of the porting - Wintergrasp was noticeably reworked - some activities are no longer updated for every second, but with an interval of 12 seconds or more, the most important activities remained current almost immediately - the players' porting to the area was confused for the classic porting to the end of the work, which was again
33) Server crash fixed
34) Fixed cancellation of the offer to BG after the end of the time limit
35) Fixed BG announcer showing now 80-80 max level