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Category:
News

[Updated] EVE Online and DUST 514 Shut Down By DDoS Attack

An unexpected weekend scramble for CCP Games as an army of disappointed space tyrants contemplate sunlight.
Image of Mat Westhorpe
Mat Westhorpe
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Published: Jun 2, 2013 03:17 pm

This article is over 11 years old and may contain outdated information

The single-sharded universe of EVE Online and DUST 514 has been offlined as the result of a sustained Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, in which unknown parties bombard a target address with a high volume of data in order to cripple normal service.

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In the early hours of Sunday morning in Europe, CCP Games personnel became aware of the attack against the London-based Tranquility server cluster and associated web servers. The server was subsequently taken offline by CCP in order to evaluate the situation and, despite a brief return to service, has remained offline since 1450 (over 5 hours at time of writing).

A Facebook statement issued by a CCP Games spokesman offered this explanation:

At 02:05 GMT June 2nd, CCP became aware of a significant and sustained distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) against the Tranquility cluster (which houses EVE Online and DUST 514) and web servers.

Our policy in such cases is to mobilize a taskforce of internal and external experts to evaluate the situation. At 03:07 GMT, that group concluded that our best course of action was to go completely offline while we put in place mitigation plans.

While we initially reopened EVE Online and DUST 514, we have since re-evaluated. With the highest sense of precaution we have taken Tranquility and associated websites back down for further investigation and an exhaustive scan of our entire infrastructure. We will update you more frequently via our Twitter feed (www.twitter.com/eveonline), however, an extended service interruption of several hours is expected as this process should not be rushed.as this process should not be rushed.

This is not the first time in EVE’s history that the Tranquility server has been subject to a DDoS attack. Two years ago an organisation known as Lulzsec performed a DDoS attack which led to the precautionary shutdown of the EVE Online gameworld.

Thus far, no one has claimed responsiblty for the attack.

More information will be supplied as it is known.

Update #1: 

Update #2:

Update #3: 

Update #4 (evidence of a recovery):

However, the cluster is not yet accepting connections:

And finally, Update #5:

For further information, the aftermath is covered in CCP after EVE/DUST DDoS Attack: ‘at no time was customer data compromised’.

 

[Statistical images courtesy of EVE Offline.]

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Author
Image of Mat Westhorpe
Mat Westhorpe
Broken paramedic and coffee-drinking Englishman whose favourite dumb animal is an oxymoron. After over a decade of humping and dumping the fat and the dead, my lower spine did things normally reserved for Rubik's cubes, bringing my career as a medical clinician to an unexpectedly early end. Fortunately, my real passion is in writing and given that I'm now highly qualified in the art of sitting down, I have the time to pursue it. Having blogged about video games (well, mostly EVE Online) for years, I hope to channel my enjoyment of wordcraft and my hobby of gaming into one handy new career that doesn't involve other people's vomit.