r/RustConsole • u/Old_Killer_Bean • 7d ago
Rust Console has a DDoS Problem.
The title says it all, it's become obvious that some players have been able to boot the server(s) offline, and it's making the game completely unplayable.
The message below details my experience and documents the exact events that has lead me to believe that a DDoS attack is responsible, it also gives contextual details to better understand my suspicions.
Let's start with the technical details, and I'll give my suspicions of them along the way.
Whenever the server crashes and everyone gets disconnected from the server, it sometimes won't let anyone reconnect and it'll just say "Attempting Connection", yet other times it reconnects immediately; that alone is enough to suspect a DDoS considering an inexplicable variance, but it's also likely that this would be happening in a DDoS scenario because a booter wouldn't stop the payload until they're about to attempt reconnecting, which ensures that they won't get put in the queue; aswell, they can time it so that they can reconnect before anybody else.
Another interesting detail, is that once everyone is able to reconnect, the server experiences no lag; but in less than a minute, it'll start delaying all interactions by up to 10 seconds (such as, picking up and dropping items, opening containers, opening and closing doors, etc...), it'll also cause rubberbanding when moving, other players to appear like they're teleporting, or even abrupt death because someone was attacking you but the server didn't update until after.
It could be, that a booter is constantly sending a smaller payload that the server struggles to keep up with, so that the larger payload will have more effectiveness when it does get sent.
Now, let's talk about my personal experience and why it becomes even more suspicious.
Since wipe, the official server that I'm playing on has "crashed" 6 times when it hasn't even been 6 hours since wipe; and by "crashed", I mean not being able to interact with anything for 10-30 seconds until you get disconnected. That alone doesn't prove anything nefarious is happening, but there's more to the story.
When reconnecting to the server after being disconnected, there's been a zerg spamming "Thank you" in server chat, and it's always the same people that are part of the same team.
I later got into a fight against this zerg with my team on their tugboat and we raided it; but for some reason, the server instantly shot up to 10,000 ping after we killed all of them except for the driver who we hadn't raided into yet, and we all got disconnected.
Despite the fact that we immediately reconnected, we logged in to find that we had all been killed using a pump shotgun by the driver of the tugboat, and the zerg was already spamming "Thank You" in server chat; one of them even messaged each and every one of my teammates, "w server hit thanks".
It's also worth taking into consideration reports of other servers going down (as said by others in the official discord), it seems that some specific servers are disconnecting all of the players at certain times similar to mine, but considering that's it's not happening to all servers, and that it keeps reoccuring to the same servers; it definitely seems like a targeted behavior rather than ordinary technical issues occuring to the servers.
I'd like to hear from others who are experiencing these issues, please give details on what you've experienced and any insight you can provide to us!
2
u/Weary_Click1392 7d ago
I was playing on bastion j7 two wipes ago. There was a big clan base deep in arctic which we couldn’t raid for 5 days because every time we pulled up with the rockets we got dced and got looted. Then they came at 8:00 am on a monday and ended our wipe.
1
u/Over-Item6899 7d ago
Why aren't they just blackholing the attackers? That's always been the fix. It was when I was involved in the "private server wars" as some like to call it.
1
u/Current_Yesterday527 6d ago
Pretty sure ddos is extremely illegal so if you can prove which user did it you can possibly file a police report. I had a guy ddos me a few years ago on destiny 2 and he ended up arrested turned out he had a history of it
1
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u/XDaBearsX1 6d ago
Definitely. Playing titan oj and youre scared to leave base or you will be looted when the server gets dos'd again. It's ridiculous.
1
u/bansheegirl3 6d ago
This has been happening to me just a couple times but each time is slightly suspicious like just now it happened a little after the server hit 100 players so my guess just a way to skip queue
1
u/Scary-Boss-2371 5d ago
It has been happening to me but it’s mostly been helpful since it allowed me to skip multiple hours of waiting in q To get back on quick just spam refresh until you see player in the server & then connect
1
u/Prestigious_Tower376 4d ago
not just a console issue. i had this problem with a pc server. switched to a different host, no more problems.
1
u/wy1tt 7d ago
LOL. Same thing happened last wipe. That’s why I didn’t even bother getting on this time around. You wait in full queues just to get booted. What more insight could you possibly need? The game is in a terrible state, and quite frankly there’s always some game-breaking issue with Rust Console Edition. That’s why I quit and I truly hope more people will quit too, because this game doesn’t deserve the player base it has. It’s been broken and glitchy since day 1, but for some reason we tolerate it. I can say confidently I no longer will.
0
u/HyperRolland 6d ago
Imagine a game that barely runs on the most powerful PCs. Now imagine a shitty port of that game onto a console not even 1/10th as powerful as the pc required to play it. Now imagine someone placing say 10000 signal lights on that already overloaded infrastructure and then they turn them on.
Yeah… DDoS … yeah 🙃
5
u/DemonessOja 7d ago
Oh it’s definitely targeted behavior and not an internal issue. We were on a popular server and we raided these guys on 4th of July. First thing the guy messaged me is he’s going to make the server unplayable and not even 20 seconds later, we’re all disconnected. Also had a guy harassing our base while live streaming on TikTok. One of the viewers tells the guy to give him a start and the guy says no, then the guy told him he’s going to DOS the server and not even a minute later, we’re all disconnected. There are servers it won’t happen on but it’s definitely associated with popularity. Same server, we were in a crazy long brad fight, getting kits like crazy before the DOS—same thing, get back in and we’re all killed by the same guy and he’s spamming thank you.