DDos stands for distributed denial of service, this is when someone tries to make a computer or console unable to respond or at least much slower to respond(lag). They do this by consistently sending traffic to that machine so that it gets overwhelmed and can’t respond to legitimate traffic. Within the gaming industry this is mostly used by people that want to annoy others or use it to gain an in game advantage. The people most likely to experience this are popular streamers who have hundreds, thousands or millions of people following them. For a casual gamer it can still cause problems if you piss someone off, come across someone who is okay with cheating or someone that’s looking to annoy someone else. If you find yourself lagging uncontrollably, seemingly out of nowhere or have received a threat by someone, here are some things you can do to stop the DDOS.
Pre DDOS Protection
VPN
VPN stands for virtual private network and it essentially acts as a middle man between your device and all other devices on the internet. Any requests or traffic going from your device will go through the VPN server and the same with any incoming traffic. This way it hides your IP address and if someone tries to DDOS you they only hit the VPN server not your computer. Most VPNs are set up so if one VPN server starts to have bad performance, they will just switch you onto another server and you will continue on without even noticing.
Get a Proxy Server
A Proxy Server acts as a middleman between you and another computer. In regards to DDOS protection this is important because a proxy server hides your IP Address. The proxy server handles all your communications and makes it seem like it is the origin of the request. This way other people won’t be able to trace your IP address and it protects you from potential DDos attacks to your IP address. For gaming it does some other useful things:
1) Increase the speed of your connection: Some gaming servers provide speeds of up to 1GBps.
2) You can login under any location: Since proxy servers handle all your communication for you and hide your location, you can appear to be from any country you want. Allowing you to enter region specific competitions or play with friends in different parts of the world.
3) Access blocked websites: Using a proxy server allows you to access websites that are blocked by your ISP or other rules on your network.
Post DDOS Fix
Change Your IP Address
An IP address is a numeric label that identifies an individual device, think of it like a name for your computer that other computers use to find it. When you go to a website like google.com, your computer takes that name, finds the IP address of google.com and then communicates with the server that has that IP address. Computers don’t understand names like google.com, they only understand IP addresses. A sample IP address would be 172.16.254.1.
If you’re already experiencing DDos because someone has found your IP address there are still things you can do. IP addresses are not static and can be changed. One way to do that is contact your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and ask them to reset it, some providers will while others may not. If they are not willing to do so, you can try powering off your devices and your router for a few hours and see if that causes a new IP address to be issued to you. You can do this right before you go to sleep and try again in the morning. Additionally, you can always switch ISPs if your current provider is unwilling to help you.
Recap
DDos attacks are used against gamers to harass them or gain a competitive advantage within the game. It works by sending traffic to a certain machine in order to cause significant lag or to prevent you from being able to use the machine at all. The best ways to prevent this is to use services like VPNs or Proxy Servers that hide your IP address while gaming. If you’re already experiencing the problem, you can change your IP address and setup a VPN or Proxy to prevent that problem from recurring. You should also report the person if you know who it is. That way they can’t continue to do that to other people and ruin the online experience.