[MUD-Dev] DoS and muds

[Chris Jacobson]

On 9/19/00 11:21 PM, Josh Rollyson (dinodrac at summit.magenet.com) stated:

>Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are unfortunally very common on my other
>addiction (IRC) and I was thinking about something, what about MUDs. 
>
>Has anyone ever though about the effects of a denial of service
>attack against a mud and how they could be used to cheat ?
>Crash bugs have been used to cheat for a long time but what about attacks
>which render all connections unusable ?
>I could see where that could be used to freeze an opponent to prevent them
>from trying to escape :
>Spam a few commands
>Packet flood the mud in question ( won't go into the details of how - thats
>for bugtraq list)
>Wait a minute or two
>Stop packeting
>Loot player.
>
>Also has anybody had experience with players trying this, and has anybody 
>ever
>tryed to come up with a way to prevent this ?
>
>Right now the only way I see to logicly stop this is to threaten deletion,
>which would negate the gains from this , but probably provoke more attacks.

Running a MUD that is a haven for rude, cruel, wantonly destructive young 
teenagers... namely, a PK and mob-killing MUD called Aliens vs 
Predator... I've seen all sorts of types of attacks on the MUD, including 
connection flooding (spamming connection attempts when banned), flooding, 
and more... msot are usually useless since we're on a good server... with 
 an admin who will block IPs at the router on request :-).  With a zero 
tolerance toward this stuff, on the incidents it happened, I actually 
took the time to contact the ISPs that were originating the attacks, and 
that is usually very fruitful.  In one instance it wasn't an ISP but a 
web hosting service run by the brother of the kid doing the connection 
floods, and I simply called the administrative contact listed for the 
domain name.

However, I have seen similiar attacks used against specific players on 
MUDs where the IP address of players was visible to other players.

- Chris Jacobson



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