RUST ULink DDos Attacks News

The popular indie game "Rust" suffered a debilitating attack on their ULink server system on December 12th, 2013. As people flock to steam, they encounter a clusterfuck of disorganized bitching and poor forum management. One thing people should know is that Rust developers do not communicate to their users through traditional means.

If you want to find out about something major users have to turn to either facebook, Twitter, or Trello.

http://playrust.com/
https://www.facebook.com/facepunchrust
https://trello.com/b/lG8jtz6v/rust

The Rust community forums are not monitored or updated daily. The playrust website contains a forum but it is like staring at the sun. It is poorly run and disorganized.

For news updates turn to social media. This is a problem for people who are not as connected or downright refuse to use these medians.

According to the PlayRust website, here is what's going on with the attacks.

So after some investigating it appears that the servers are receiving DDOS attacks. Not the usual, send loads of traffic at a server until it chokes and can’t take any more ddos attack. It kind of seems like someone is periodically grabbing the server list and attacking any occupied server with a bunch of empty packets. 

We use a networking library called uLink. It works well for us. We can get 300 people on a single server. We’re happy. But it is not without its issues. I get the feeling that it’s not that widely used – so there’s a lot of relatively simple exploits that haven’t been found. We’ve reported issues. A lot. But always seem to receive the same responses. Basically – it’s going to be fixed in the future, in an update that is planned for the next month, that never really gets released. 

I’ve optimistically reported the latest issues to them, but we’re not that hopeful that we’ll get a timely fix. We’d love to take matters into our own hands but we can’t look into the issues and fix them ourselves because all their code is obfuscated. 

So we’re stuck. We have to either convince them to fix the exploits for us, use a different networking library.. or write our own. This is something we have to have a long discussion about internally. 

In the meantime we have to apologise for the ddos attacks. We know it’s not totally our fault – but at the same time it is. If you have exploits then people are going to exploit them. That’s just how the world works. We hope they get bored soon and everyone can get back to playing and we can get back to making. Until that happens we all have to suffer through this crap – which unfortunately we can do nothing but apologise for.