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On the evening of August 24, the topic of "Steam crashed" became a hot search topic, and many netizens reported that they were unable to log in and enter the game. In this regard, some people speculated that it was caused by too many people online in the game "Black Myth: Wukong".

The Perfect World competitive platform announced that the Steam crash was caused by a DDoS attack, and players can try to reconnect to the game. The reporter of the Daily Economic News noticed that after a period of crash, around 8:30 pm on the 24th, some players said that Steam's status had returned to normal.

On the Perfect World competitive platform, a player sent a screenshot showing that Steam was under DDoS attack.

It is understood that DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service) refers to an attack behavior in which an attacker uses network packets from a large number of real or fake clients to initiate network connection requests to the target system, thereby consuming a large amount of resources of the target system and making it unable to respond to normal user requests.

However, netizens' speculation is not groundless. Since its launch on August 20, Black Myth: Wukong has ignited the enthusiasm of the entire gaming industry and set new records for domestic stand-alone games. About an hour after its launch, the Steam peak online user count of Black Myth: Wukong exceeded 1 million, and continued to rise, eventually reaching a peak online user count of over 2 million on the day of its launch, surpassing games such as Cyberpunk 2077, Paloo the Beast, and CS2, and ranked second on Steam's historical highest online user count ranking.

On the evening of August 23, the official Weibo account of "Black Myth: Wukong" stated that as of 21:00 Beijing time on August 23, 2024, the sales volume of "Black Myth: Wukong" across all platforms has exceeded 10 million copies, and the maximum number of concurrent online users across all platforms has reached 3 million.

On the evening of the 24th, Li Weichen, VP of Technology at Knowsec, told a reporter from the Daily Economic News that DDoS attacks are very common in the gaming industry, especially when popular games appear. Hackers may use DDoS to attack game manufacturers or gaming platforms, causing them to miss opportunities to earn ideal income, and use this as a threat to gain commercial benefits. Of course, the profit-making methods of launching DDoS attacks are not only to extort directly from manufacturers, "affecting stock market value, collecting compensation from competitors, and using financial leverage to arbitrage are all possible."

Li Weichen further stated that DDoS has a very long history, but it is still a very effective form of attack. There are even mature and convenient SaaS services (software operation services) that are available to people who need them for a fee in the name of stress testing. "It is also very cheap. A few thousand yuan can paralyze the target system, and the economic losses can be calculated in seconds. The 'cost-effectiveness' is extremely high."

It is worth mentioning that Knowsec is one of the earliest cybersecurity companies in China to propose the concept of SaaS cloud defense. It processes hundreds of billions of network requests every day and resists more than 1 billion hacker attacks. At present, the company has created anti-D protection specifically for DDoS defense, as well as the Knowsec cloud defense platform composed of Knowsec Shield (cloud WAF) and NetShield (content security risk management).

Li Weichen believes that it is difficult to completely defend against DDoS attacks. In the final analysis, it depends on who can mobilize more bandwidth resources, the attacker or the defender. However, ordinary Internet business operators will not reserve hundreds or thousands of times of redundant resources for potential risks of being attacked, so when an attack actually occurs, they can hardly cope with it on their own.

So, what is the most effective way to deal with DDoS attacks now?

"We use the anti-DDoS service of cloud defense vendors. When an attack occurs, the cloud defense platform will call on all network resources to fight against hackers." Li Weichen said that the bandwidth that cloud defense vendors can dispatch ranges from several Tbps to hundreds of Tbps, far exceeding the magnitude of DDoS attacks, and these reserve bandwidths are shared by all customers, so the cost will not be unacceptable. Game manufacturers generally cooperate with cloud defense service providers to deal with DDoS attacks. At the same time, in order to prevent excessive DDoS attacks from affecting business, there are generally some backup measures, such as backup domain names and backup servers. In addition, cloud native and container technologies also provide convenience for elastic expansion and contraction of business, which can increase resources in a short period of time and smoothly cope with business peaks.

The Gcore report shows that in the first half of 2024, DDoS attacks surged by 46%, and the gaming and gambling industry remained the most affected industry, accounting for 49% of the total attacks. Due to the competitive nature and the high economic interests involved in online games, the industry is particularly vulnerable to attacks.