333networks

Hello Darkelarious,

I am the guy that has contacted you about supporting Rune so I'm familiar with you and the service. I'm very glad you guys are around and it does me well to see that you guys will not budge, I'm sorry for the troubles this has braught upon you guys. I have noticed some downtime lately or some weird masterserver behaviour in general, I wasn't sure if it was just the planned maintenance or DDoS-attempts, sadly this problem has gone beyond just Rune now.

It's true that our community has suffered from massive DDoS-attempts, someone is aiming down all the active runeservers (Zaphirs, Er, REC and other innocent servers), I am currently in charge of all the ER servers and I think I can provide you the information you are asking for. I have tried to stop these attacks but due to the small scale of our community it's simply not affordable to buy some decent mitigation protection.

The problem started with some German guy named ''Blablabla'' getting banned by a member of my clan for deliberate bugabuse on my servers, I have unbanned him after a request on our forums HERE. After a while he got banned for the same stuff and that's when this guy started sending DDoS attacks to my servers. Normally I'm not a banhappy guy and I would have probably unbanned him, but when it comes to taking down servers I have decided to keep the ban there. I will not budge, just like you guys are. I guess crashing ER servers wasn't enough, he also started attacking other innocent populated servers members of my clan have been playing on. So in the end all the active runeservers have him banned and I guess he wants his his revenge by sending DDoS attacks to all of these servers, he probably enjoys causing mayhem so I don't try to spend much of my free time on it. All the active servers are currently being hit 24/7, he's probably spending his holidays F5ing the serverlist and entering IP's and portnumbers in his IP-stress tool the whole day.

What can I say about his methods? As far as I know he has a few methods, most commonly he's using some UDP flood attack with spoofed IP's. The attacks are not large in scale, the problem is the amount of small useless packages flooding the pipeline of the server. He's just attacking the open port of the gameserver and that's it.

FYI: I don't have full proof it's the same guy, but I have my reasons to believe he is. I currently have just 1 person banned on my servers (motive), our community isn't big to begin with plus the same guy has been joining my servers with several proxyservers. Someone going through that kind of effort, posting on this forum (Account HERE) plus his refreshing of the serverlist during the times of attack makes me believe he is. I also have a screenshot of him playing on a server, someone mentioning a private IP and portnumber in the chat (not listed on the masterserver) -> one minute after that that server got attacked with the same DDoS attack as well. I have full joinlogs with times and dates of this guy playing on his normal ISP and all the nicknames he has been using to join our servers. I have also saved quite a few logfiles of his attacks on several servers of mine. I might even have some personal information about him (not verified) plus some fake references he has been using. I think he's part of some sort of group called 4ducky, it would explain his access to all of his tools. Contact me in PM and I will give you everything I have.

I don't know if it's even possible to take any legal measures against this and I have not even bothered trying to do so myself, but you guys have my full support and I'll be willing to help you guys out 100%. I am spending money to host servers and I'm just trying to do my part into keeping this game alive. Sadly our small community is just dying because of this and people are just playing on private servers. Either way, it's good to have more people around you that are willing to do this and I think it might be possible to include HumanHead as well, they are still selling Rune Classic on Steam and they are using your service.

We are very grateful you guys are supporting our game and are continuing to do so! Thanks a lot.

/Neelix