With more than 500 million registered users and 166 million monthly players, Minecraft is at significant risk from decentralized denial of service (DDoS) attacks, threatening server functionality, player experience, and the game’s reputation. Despite the prevalence of DDoS attacks in gaming, most incidents go unreported, leading to gaps in awareness and protection. This article explains what happens to Minecraft servers during a DDoS attack and how to protect against such attacks. For an in-depth version of this article, check out this white paper.
When a Creeper Breaks Through: What happens when an attack succeeds
When a Minecraft server is under a DDoS attack, players may experience problems logging into the server, loading worlds, navigating biomes, using tools, and chatting. They may also experience widespread lag, disconnections, timeouts, or server crashes. These in-game outages can disrupt players’ gaming experiences while causing financial and reputational damage to server owners, operators and the wider Minecraft community.
What happens to Minecraft servers during a DDoS attack?
In a DDoS attack, the attacker’s goal is to disrupt the Minecraft server and make it unstable or unusable by legitimate users by injecting a large amount of malicious traffic into the Minecraft server until it is overwhelmed. A DDoS attack on a Minecraft server can last from a few seconds to a few days, depending on the severity of the attack and the countermeasures taken.
A serious attack could cause players to lose winnings in tournaments, erode player confidence in the server, cause the server to crash, or even force the server to be upgraded for better redundancy and resistance to future attacks.
evidence of attack
This checklist can serve as a handy reference guide when faced with suspicious network activity like a DDoS attack.
| symptom | describe | |
| ⑨ | sudden surge in traffic | Sudden spikes in traffic patterns can be strong indicators of DDoS activity because they often involve large volumes of traffic or packets. |
| ⑨ | port congestion | Surges in traffic to specific ports on your network infrastructure may also indicate DDoS activity. |
| ⑨ | Too many requests | Excessive connection requests from a certain IP or IP range detected by a rate limiter may signal DDoS activity or brute force attempts. |
| ⑨ | Increase resource usage | DDoS attacks place huge demands on server resources such as CPU and RAM. |
| ⑨ | Internet speed is unusually slow | After a sudden spike or burst, the network connection may be affected and become extremely slow, seriously affecting gameplay. |
| ⑨ | Unresponsive | Depending on the location or type of attack, players may experience lag and lag, and be unable to perform in-game actions, interact with biomes, or chat. |
| ⑨ | unavailable | An intensive or widespread DDoS attack can overwhelm a server’s resources, forcing it offline or crashing. |
| ⑨ | widespread complaints | Widespread complaints within the Minecraft community indicate that major DDoS attacks are targeting multiple servers simultaneously. |
| ⑨ | Increase billing | Minecraft server owners on a pay-as-you-go plan may notice a sudden spike in their compute or subscription fees. |
If your Minecraft server is showing multiple signs of this at any given time, it’s likely that it’s under a DDoS attack and needs to be repaired immediately.
If you are unsure whether an attack has occurred, please contact your ISP or host. They should be able to verify if this is a DDoS attack. In some cases, these signs may be symptoms of other cyberattacks or unrelated network issues, thus producing false positive results.
Impact on Minecraft servers and the Minecraft community
DDoS attacks will have a significant impact on Minecraft servers, players, server owners, and the entire community. Interrupted gameplay isn’t the only problem. In extreme cases, attacks that cause players to miss out on important tournament earnings can have tragic consequences and have profound emotional impacts that ripple across entire communities and affect friends and family. This emphasizes the need for strong protection and awareness.
A DDoS attack on Minecraft servers can have a variety of effects:
- Poor gaming experience: DDoS attacks can cause lag, lag, or disconnections, making Minecraft unplayable and negatively impacting the user experience.
- Unbalanced gameplay: Rival players may take advantage of unresponsive servers during a DDoS attack to unfairly gain themselves an advantage over players on the target server.
- Server downtime: Crucially for online gaming, server outages caused by intense DDoS attacks can render Minecraft servers unavailable, frustrating players who invest time, energy, energy and passion into building, exploring and interacting with the Minecraft environment .
- Financial loss: DDoS attacks can cause potential revenue losses for server owners who rely on donations, premium memberships, or in-game purchases. Attackers may demand payment to mitigate attacks, but complying with the ransom demand invites future attacks.
- extra expenses: Fake DDoS attacks can cause traffic fluctuations and increase the management costs of cloud hosting servers.
- Identity theft: DDoS can be a smokescreen for hacking and identity theft, increasing vulnerability during periods of server unavailability.
- Server ban for innocent parties: Sustained DDoS attacks on shared hosting plans could cause Minecraft servers to be temporarily banned, impacting server members and server owners who rely on members’ income for financial support.
- Damaged reputation: Sustained DDoS attacks can damage the reputation of Minecraft servers, causing the server’s popularity and user base to decline.
- Community impact: Sustained DDoS attacks can crash Minecraft servers, disrupt social interactions, and drive players away.
- Transfer costs: Gamers face tangible and intangible costs when migrating to new servers, including the loss of in-game purchases and achievements, subscriptions, and relationships.
Recent attack examples
Most Minecraft server DDoS attacks never make the news. For the reasons stated above, many small-scale attacks target individuals or private servers. However, larger DDoS attacks are more likely to attract media attention because of their value as a marketing strategy for DDoS protection providers, or because of the real-world consequences of the attacks.
In 2022, the largest Minecraft DDoS attack ever targeted the popular Wynncraft Minecraft server. A Mirai botnet variant used UDP and TCP flood packets to launch a two-minute-long 2.5 Tbps attack against servers designed to disrupt the gaming experience of hundreds of thousands of players.
Massive attacks of this magnitude, along with more attacks targeting private and smaller servers that receive less attention, highlight the need to be wary of Minecraft DDoS attacks. Therefore, server owners, administrators, engineers and hosting providers must protect their servers and the users who rely on them. Let’s explore some ways to mitigate DDoS.
Obsidian Wall: How to Protect Minecraft Servers from DDoS Attacks
Basic protective measures
To protect your Minecraft server from DDoS attacks, start with basic security measures:
- Install antivirus software to block malware that could include your server in a botnet.
- Use a VPN to hide the server’s IP address.
- Protect your SSH connections by changing the SSH port number or using PuTTY to switch to key-generated SSH security.
- Implement whitelists or whitelists to only allow access to verified players, and use blacklists to block malicious IPs or players.
- Get a firewall, especially for self-hosted servers.
- Add rate limits on network devices to manage traffic.
- Keep your Minecraft server software and plugins up to date to patch vulnerabilities.
It’s important to stay informed about the latest DDoS strategies, signs, and countermeasures, and to make sure server administrators are informed as well. Building a strong, supportive community and promoting a positive gaming environment by vetting new members and monitoring forum chats for threats can stop peer-to-peer DDoS attacks. If you encounter a serious threat, do not hesitate to contact law enforcement or seek legal assistance.
Advanced protective measures
The above protection measures are basic network security solutions; in order to comprehensively defend against DDoS attacks, specialized methods like Gcore DDoS Protection are needed. We provide instant, integrated protection against DDoS attacks of any size, duration or complexity, ensuring uninterrupted gaming. Gcore DDoS Protection is built by gamers, for gamers, providing tailor-made defense mechanisms, ultra-low false alarm rates, and dedicated technical support to ensure your Minecraft servers are protected at any time, anywhere, and under any circumstances. Protect.
By analyzing traffic and customizing protection strategies, we can protect your servers across all Minecraft versions and plugins. Our robust infrastructure is capable of handling massive DDoS traffic spikes via a CDN with 110 Tbps capacity. Based on sessions rather than relying solely on IP addresses, we block attacks from the first query without impacting legitimate traffic.
Diamond Defense: proven gaming protection
Prevention is better than cure. According to data from Gcore Radar and the FBI, the gaming industry is one of the three most attacked industries, with an average game DDoS attack causing victims as much as $25,000 in losses (without considering any ransom). Even for teams with in-house IT departments, an attack can require significant time and manpower to achieve disaster recovery, and even more time to repair the reputation damaged by a full-blown DDoS attack.
Gcore DDoS Protection is a complete, proven service for mitigating DDoS attacks on Minecraft servers. Get a free expert consultation to find out how we can protect your servers and protect you from the devastating consequences of a DDoS attack. Start with a free trial and experience the power of Gcore DDoS protection for yourself.
