DoS attack while hosting an Xbox live game?

rashers10

Hi,

I had a strange experience on XBox live over the weekend and was wondering if it something similar happened to anyone else.
I was playing CoD MW3 with a few mates in my house. There were 4 of us connecting to multiplayer matches from my connection.
As expected when 4 players in the match are coming from the one connection, you tend to be the host a lot.

Anyway, we were in a game and this american kid says in the middle of the game, 'who here is connecting from Galway on an Eircom connection ? '
None of us answered but we thought it was very dodgy.

Anyway a few minutes later, everything got laggy, the game bombed out and my router went down. Took 15 mins to get the router back up.

I thought it was just a coincidence but after talking to some of the guys in work, they were saying that if I was hosting he could look at the outbound connection on his side, get the IP address, do a lookup to get some info on that IP and that he could then run something to spam the xbox live port on my connection and essentially launch a mini Denial of service attack.

Sounds like a lot of work just to be an a-hole?
Has this happened to anyone else or am I being super paranoid? Apparently it happens in Fifa 12 sometimes if the guy is loosing 2 nil or something, he can bomb out the connection to avoid the loss.

srsly78

This is one of the main cheats used on consoles. It's even worse if the cheater is hosting, they can use a proxy to selectively lag opponents out (like the guy did to you). If you were hosting and he did it, the whole game would lag out for everyone.

Only way to combat this is to assign each player a "trustworthy host rating", with hosts that display inconsistent pings given a bad rating. Then the matchmaker can avoid using these people. Halo and some other games use a system like this.

Main problem is this type of cheating doesn't tamper with the console, but rather relies on a "man in the middle" interfering with the network. Thus it's not so easy to detect as other cheats.

rashers10

Ok thanks. So it's not that unusual and there is nothing really can be done about it.
I don't expect Infinity Ward/Sledgehammer to do much about it anyway seeing as there patches so far have been sketchy at best and they still allow consequence free rage quitting (which is slowly starting to destroy the game).

I'm sure they could detect this 'spikes' of activity and ban those accounts?

Mr E

Moved from Games to Xbox.

srsly78

In theory they can. But often it's hard to tell difference between a legitimate disconnect and one forced by DoS. This is why some games use a "host rating". This works if they are a cheating host not client tho is problem. They do ban people they catch doing this.

If they DoS your router, there is no xbox involved at all. They use a linux box most likely to send the rubbish data to your router. Xbox live has no way of seeing this.

Having centralised servers is another way. If someone tries to DoS the official server they can be detected. The problem with many games is they are peer-to-peer, one player hosts and a few others connect.

rashers10

Ok I guess so but I'm pretty sure the same thing happens on PS3?

srsly78

Any game using peer to peer over the internet can be affected by people messing around with the connection. Doesn't matter whether it's xbox/ps3 or PC.

rashers10

Mr E wrote: »

Moved from Games to Xbox.

Yeah, I figured, I was just grumbling about the thread move