Ubisoft is taking a number of steps to try and cut down on the impact distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have on Rainbow Six Siege matches, including steps toward legal action against regular offenders.
Siege is a competitive, team-based game played entirely online, making it a prime target for DDoS attacks and other malicious actions against the servers hosting matches. And, as Ubisoft explains in a post to the Rainbow Six Siege website, the number of those attacks have noticeably increased lately, prompting the team to make a number of changes to address the issue.
As a result, Ubisoft has already begun issuing cease and desist notices to the websites and people hosting prominent DDoS services, and is working with its legal team to take action against those that facilitate the attacks.
Within the game itself, Ubisoft is cutting back on matches per server to hopefully reduce the number of games affected when a DDoS attack strikes. Previously, each server could host three simultaneous games, meaning that an attack targeting one game ultimately took three offline. Moving forward, each server will only host one match at a time.
Ubisoft is also rolling out a wave of bans to the “worst offenders” on both PC and console, and is disabling a feature that unintentionally penalized players for being in a match ended prematurely by a DDoS attack. Details can be found in the full post.
Online games have long struggled against DDoS attacks, but recent years have seen the perpetrators of large-scale attacks against games like World of Warcraft hit with substantial fines and prison time for their actions.
Last summer, the person behind a 2010 DDoS attack on World of Warcraft was sentenced to federal prison and ordered to pay roughly $30,000 in restitution. Another case, this time against the person behind the 2013 attacks on Daybreak, saw the attacker ordered to pay $95,000 in restitution and sentenced to two years in prison.