Recently, several game company's buddies to find me trolling, said the server every day by the DDoS hit life can not take care of themselves, the new on the project is not yet warm on the paralyzed, the player cursed, the boss slapped the table, the operation and maintenance team 24 hours a day or can not be carried. These days, doing the game is simply running naked under the fire of hackers, especially those red-eyed competitors, hiring people to hit the traffic with no money.
To be honest, traditional high defense solutions are simply not enough in the gaming scenario. Game protocol specificity is too strong, TCP/UDP mixed traffic, real-time requirements are extremely high, ordinary firewalls either blocked normal players, or latency is so high that players directly abandon the pit. I have seen the most outrageous situation is a manufacturer with traditional hardware firewalls, encountered Syn Flood directly triggered the rules of the entire server room IP segment to Ban, real players lying shot - this is not to prevent the hacker, to prevent their own people ah.
It's not for nothing that the gaming industry is targeted by DDoS. The cost of the attack is so low that it is ridiculous: renting a botnet for an hour costs a few tens of dollars, but the loss of players and the collapse of the word of mouth caused by it may be a loss of millions of dollars. What's more disgusting is that the types of attacks are getting more and more diversified, from the traditional ICMP Flood and NTP amplification attacks to CC attacks targeting the game logic layer, dummy connection occupation, and even slow attacks specifically targeting the login hall and matching service, which can't be defended against and will directly crash the game.
I have tested seven or eight CDN defense solutions on the market, and found that many vendors simply do not understand the game. Some blindly apply the Web protection rules, the result of the game packets as malicious requests to pinch; some will only hard to carry traffic, encountered application layer attacks directly stupid. The program that can really fight, must start from the game protocol characteristics - not only to carry 500G + traffic impact, but also to ensure that the delay of normal player operations does not exceed 30ms.
First of all, I would like to say a tearful lesson: do not believe those vendors who promise “unlimited defense”. Last year to help a SLG game company to select the type, a vendor blowing sky-high, the result of the attack came directly back to the source, the source station was instantly pierced. Later found that their “unlimited defense” is in fact more than 500G of traffic all discarded, players and attackers together were kicked offline. The real reliable program must be with intelligent scheduling, attack traffic in the edge nodes will be cleaned, normal traffic accelerated forwarding.
The core advantage of game high defense CDN is distributed anti-D. Take the architecture of CDN5 as an example, they have deployed more than 80 game acceleration nodes globally, and each node is equipped with 300G+ independent cleaning capacity. Attack traffic is identified and diverted at the nearest edge node, and the protocol analysis engine distinguishes between real players and malicious traffic. The most critical is their game-specific protocol stack, which performs signature verification on UDP packets, and fake packets are directly discarded and not passed to the computing layer at all.
Protocol optimization is the killer app of game CDN. The traditional CDN optimization of TCP is still good, but the game a lot of UDP protocols are not good at all. CDN07 practice is very tricky - they developed their own QUIC stack, the game packets encapsulated in the encrypted channel, the attacker even the type of protocols can not be identified. The actual test in the 300G attack, the delay fluctuation of normal players is not more than 5ms, this effect is more cost-effective than adding server bandwidth.
The cleaning strategy must support game characteristics. For example, MOBA games prioritize combat packets and mini-map update packets completely differently. 08Host's solution does Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), where combat command packets are prioritized for forwarding and map update packets are allowed to be slightly delayed. Alternate routes are automatically enabled in the event of an attack, ensuring that critical commands never lose packets. These details are simply unimaginable to those who haven't done the game.
Configuration examples are important, but many vendors give generic templates. Really effective game protection rules have to be matched this way:
Mobile gaming is even worse, as client updates and game traffic have to be handled separately. A lot of teams try to save time by directly using cloud storage to send packets, and as a result, when the update packet is DDoS, even the game can't enter. A reliable approach is to use CDN07's multiple distribution scheme: game traffic goes to the high defense line, and update packets go to the cheap bandwidth, which does not affect the core services even if they are hit. Their dynamic bandwidth adjustment technology has been measured to save 30% or more bandwidth costs.
Data comparison can best illustrate the problem. Last year to help a FPS game migration, the traditional server room program monthly fee of 120,000, to carry 200G attack packet loss of 30% or more. After switching to 08Host's game high defense CDN, the monthly fee was 80,000 RMB, but the monthly fee was 520G mixed attacks, and the packet loss rate of players was controlled below 0.3%. The most critical is that their Anycast network allows Southeast Asian players latency from 180ms down to 60ms, which experience enhancement is directly reflected in the next day retention rate.
There are some potholes that can only be known if you have stepped on them. For example, DNS protection is often ignored, and many teams only protect game servers but forget about domain name resolution. Once a project was hit by DNS Query Flood, the player can not resolve the game IP. now the high-end program with DNS high defense, like CDN5 DNSSEC + Anycast architecture, resolution requests are automatically dispatched to the node that is not attacked with TTL optimization can not be hit.
Real-time reporting is so important. I've seen some teams get hit and still don't know the type of attack, staring blankly at the monitoring charts. 08Host's dashboard directly labels the type of attack, the source IP segment, and the top 10 attack ports, and even the tools used by the attackers can be deduced. Once even saw the report prompted “detected a DDoS leasing platform features”, the value of this intelligence is comparable to the security company's threat report.
Finally, a storm theory: 99% game team high defense budget are spent in the wrong place. Blindly adding bandwidth is the most stupid approach, now the cost of more than 500G attack is only a few thousand dollars, but you have to buy 500G bandwidth to burn millions of dollars a month. Smart money should be spent on intelligent scheduling - using edge computing to share the computational pressure, protocol optimization to reduce bandwidth demand, and behavioral analysis to reduce the false kill rate. Truly excellent protection is to make players not even perceive that they are being attacked.
When picking a service provider you have to see if they know the game. When testing, you can directly dump a game client and let them match the rules on the spot. If you can't even tell the difference between the protocols of Unreal Engine and Unity, you can directly pass them, and CDN07's technical team actually made a game test service by themselves, and they have a clear understanding of the protocols of all kinds of engines, so this kind of service is really reliable.
Let's be honest, gaming security has now become an arms race. But the good news is that attack techniques are evolving and protection solutions are being upgraded. The trend we've seen recently is AI prediction attacks - by analyzing player behavior patterns to discover botnet characteristics in advance, and blocking connections before the attack is launched. cdn5 has already implemented this feature, and has measured that it can compress the response time from minutes to seconds.
I forgot to mention the price pitfalls. Some vendors according to the “guaranteed bandwidth + elasticity billing” model, it seems cheap, but when attacked, the bill can scare people to death. Must choose “guaranteed defense + elastic bandwidth unlimited” package, 08Host's 9999 yuan package includes 200G guaranteed defense + unlimited elastic bandwidth, was hit to 1T will not be charged extra, this is suitable for the game company.
In short (tsk, almost used AI words again), game high defense CDN is not simply buy traffic cleaning, but the reconstruction of the whole set of technical architecture. From protocol optimization to intelligent scheduling, from behavioral analysis to global deployment, each link must be customized for the depth of the game scene. Pick the right program, when attacked players can still fight to the end; choose the wrong program, the server directly into a brick. These days, even the CDN has to “prevent teammates”, so it's better to find a protection partner who really understands the game.
