What is a DDoS attack and why do game servers get targeted?

What DDoS actually means

DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service. The goal is simple: flood a server with so much fake traffic that it can no longer answer real requests. Your players try to connect and cannot, because the server is busy with millions of useless packets sent by the attacker.

"Distributed" means the attack comes from many places at once: thousands of infected devices around the world sending traffic to your server at the same time. That is why you cannot stop it by blocking one IP address.

Why game servers get targeted

Game servers are attacked more than almost any other kind of server, and the reasons are often petty.

A rival community wants your players. A banned player wants revenge. A cheater wants the anti-cheat offline. Someone lost a match and took it personally. In competitive games especially, knocking an opponent's server offline during a match is sadly common.

Game servers are also easy targets because they work in real time. A website can serve cached pages, but a game server has to answer within milliseconds. Even a small attack that a website would not notice can make a game server unplayable.

What protection actually does

When a protected server is attacked, traffic first passes through a filtering system that checks every packet and separates real game traffic from attack traffic. Only clean traffic reaches the server. Players notice nothing, and the attacker watches the attack disappear.

Two things matter: how much traffic can be filtered and how fast the attack is detected. The faster the detection, the shorter the window in which players feel anything.

One more thing people forget: protection has to understand game traffic. Filtering that is too aggressive also kicks real players, and then the attacker wins anyway.

Protection at Wiptor

At Wiptor, DDoS protection is included on every server at no extra cost. Filtering is always on and reacts automatically. On top of that, servers and websites are protected by Wiptor Layer 7, our agent that stops application-level attacks, and in the Wiptor panel you see the blocked attacks and tune the protection yourself.

We do not sell protection as an add-on, because a game server without protection is not a complete server. If your server is down, we have not done our job.

See how Wiptor protection works