The purpose of a DDoS attack is to disrupt the server. It floods the server with data causing it to become sluggish and eventually crash. Gaming companies usually carry DDoS protection but after this Zenimax will have to up theirs.

UltimaJoe777 wrote: »

The purpose of a DDoS attack is to disrupt the server. It floods the server with data causing it to become sluggish and eventually crash. Gaming companies usually carry DDoS protection but after this Zenimax will have to up theirs.

*whoosh*

Basically a DDoS attack is a Distrbuted Denial of Service attack.

This is usualy achieved by infecting multiple pc's and even servers with a Trojan style virus that is designed to send large packets of random data to a specific open port on an IP address specified by the person who implemented the virus.

This means that huge amounts of data are flooding into the servers from dozens of different sources and are literally overloading them, imagine if you were trying to run a dozen video editors all rendering a video at the same time on your own machine, that would be a similar effect but on a smaller scale.

Although there are ways of shutting down a DDoS attack it's not always a quick and easy thing to do. Many servers simply close the port being targeted and switch to a new one, however with mmo's many of the open ports they use are fixed because of the nature of the client and closing them would effect their customers as badly as the attack itself, at the least it could mean shutting down the servers and issue a small patch ot reconfigure the client ports.

However this isn't desirable so they try to block the incoming data by blocking the IP's sending it, this takes time because there are dozens if not hundreds or even thousands of incoming IP's some legitimate and some attackers, they have to identify each one and IP block it, which as you can imagine takes quite a while to do.

Khajiit might have fallen asleep under the server and tangled up some wires in her sleep thinking they were yarn ...

It was nice and warm there!

Yours with paws
Santie Claws

I don't think ZoS is DDoS'd at the moment, their servers are just throwing a ***.

I do believe that some people are running a lagswitch though, it always seems to lag when you are in their proximity and it stops when you get away from them. It's not a coincidence either because it's always the same individuals it seems to happen around with. And it's not server lag or zerg induced lag. It can be perfectly fine one moment, but as soon as said individual approaches, horrid lag just spawns out of nowhere and goes away when he is gone.

People may ask, but how does such a thing benefit them if they lag too? Some skills are affected more by lag, some are even impossible to use when lagged, yet when someone has a build consisting of straightforward instahitting skills, they can spam them and eventually server catches up and you are bombarded with 5-6 hits and dead without a chance to ever fight back yet try firing any channeled skill or induction based skill in lag - pointless.
People find many ways to use and abuse the system, withand without 3rd party tools.