The organisers of Chinese Dota 2 league G-1 have been forced to suspend play for the rest of today and tomorrow after repeated Distributed Denial of Service attacks crippled qualifying games.
“Over the past few days, the G-1 Western Qualifiers has been the subject of DDoS attacks from unknown sources, which has caused players to continuously disconnect and made it impossible to carry out the competition,” read an official statement, translated by Redditors.
“In light of the current situation, 17173 has decided to postpone the Western Qualifiers while waiting for a technical solution, possibly from Valve.”
The attacks began on Sunday with the mass disconnection of Evil Geniuses during their bout with Absolute Legends. The team were unable to reconnect, and admins eventually declared Absolute Legends winners due to the advantage they held before the attack. Later, Virtus.Pro were forced to substitute two stand-ins after suffering disconnections in their match against Mousesports.
Yesterday, Kaipi won their second game against Team Empire despite a DDOS-induced 4 v 5 handicap, and a Team Dignitas v QPAD Red Pandas match was abandoned until further notice when both Dignitas and commentator Ayesee were targeted.
The identity of the attackers is unknown, but a 4Chan poster claiming responsibility boasted the ability to fix a $20,000 match bet remotely. While betting providers like DotaLounge and Pinnaclesports will forfeit any bets subject to foul play, hackers can still conceivably use DDOS attacks to overturn the table of a game that isn’t going their way.
Some have speculated that the attackers are exploiting a known issue with Skype, which allows users to obtain target IP addresses and overload their target with botnets. However, Dignitas’ Aui speculated onTwitterthat his IP had been pulled from his Steam Friends list.
Imagine that anybody with a brain and access to the internet was able to open the heavens and halt the cricket. That’s more or less the nature of the issue not just 17173, but all of eSports, is facing. So what’s the solution?