Game developer Ubisoft has sued the owners of SNG.ONE, an
alleged DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) website, claiming that they are behind
recent attacks against Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege servers.
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege is a multiplayer game
developed and published by Ubisoft. In this multiplayer game, teams of players faced
off in online matches. The players are highly competitive and would do anything
to win the game, and that includes DDoSing opponents.
Players can win a match if the other party loses its Internet
connection, and this is where DDoS-for-hire comes into play. When the server
notices that a player exits from the match, for whatever reason, it grants victory
to the other team. Even if the Internet connection doesn’t drop, making it
unplayable would still be sufficient.
Since people are willing to pay for this kind of service,
a small industry operating DDoS services has been flourishing, and Ubisoft alleges
that SNG.ONE is one of those services. The service claims to offer penetration
testing specifically for DDoS attacks, and they also reportedly offer a
firewall solution capable of withstanding such attacks. They only accept
payment in Bitcoin.
“Defendants are members of a business enterprise
that provides its customers with subscription-based access to software and
other online services designed to enable their customers to perpetrate targeted
denial-of-service (“DoS”) and distributed denial-of-service
(“DDoS”) attacks (the “DDoS Attacks”) on the computer
servers that enable R6S players to play and compete in the game (collectively,
the “DDoS Services”),” state the legal documents obtained by Polygon.
Ubisoft is asking the courts to shut down the service and
is requesting damages. They also named the defendants as Dennis Kruk and
Maximilian Kuehl (Germany), Kelvin (Kevin) Uttih (Nigeria), and B.R from the
Netherlands.
During the attacks, Ubisoft proactively fought the
attackers and made changes to the servers so that the players would not feel
the impact of DDoS attackers. The company says it managed to reduce the
negative effect on multiplayer matches by 93%.