Ubisoft are taking the owners of a website offering DDoS (Dedicated Denial of Service) attacks against Rainbow Six: Siege to court.. The lawsuit, filed in California last week, accused the owners of SNG.ONE and affiliated sites of offering server-killing services at a premium. Ubisoft are seeking to have the sites concerned shut down for good, and for the owners to pay up for damages and court fees.
As Polygon reported on Friday, Ubisoft claim the efforts of SNG.ONE have cost the publishers “significant sums of money” in fixing the damage caused by their attacks. It’s also caused a hit to their reputation, with disgruntled players leaving the game when it becomes unplayable.
“In order to maintain Ubisoft’s strong community of dedicated R6S players, Ubisoft has invested considerable time, money, and effort into ensuring that all of its players have a positive, fun, and rewarding experience each time they play R6S. By this lawsuit, Ubisoft seeks to stop an unscrupulous commercial group of hackers and profiteers dedicated to harming Ubisoft’s games and destroying the R6S player experience for their own personal financial benefit.”
DDoS attacks work by flooding a server with information it can’t handle, filling it to capacity and making it unavailable for use. Ubisoft alleges that, for a price, users of the accused sites could choose to have Rainbow Six: Siege servers attacked, halting games and booting players hosted on the server.
The lawsuit contains screenshots of the site, showing offers to initiate strikes against not only Rainbow 6, but games like Fortnite, FIFA 20, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. For just under £230 ($300), users can buy lifetime access to the site’s DDoS server – or else set up a subscription for roughly $30/m, for the server-killer on a budget.
Ubisoft reckon that not only are the attackers aware of the harm they cause, but they’re really quite smug about it. The doc includes a screenshot of a (now-deleted) tweet poking fun at Ubisoft’s attempts to ban DDoS attack instigators. Seeming to know legal action was imminent, the site owners even created a fictional seizure notice, claiming the site had already been appropriated by Ubisoft and Microsoft. Ubi claim the defendants later admitted to creating the falsified takedown “in order to get Ubisoft to admit that they have a problem.”
The problem of not wanting their servers maliciously attacked, I guess? Bit of a bizarre moral play, that.
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