Minecraft, with more than 500 million registered users and 166 million monthly players, faces significant risks from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which threaten server functionality, player experience and the game’s reputation. Despite the prevalence of DDoS attacks on gaming, the majority of incidents go unreported, leaving a gap in awareness and protection. This article explains what happens to a Minecraft server during a DDoS attack and how to protect yourself from such attacks. For an in-depth version of the article, see this white paper.
When the Creepers Break In: What happens when an attack is successful
When a Minecraft server is hit by a DDoS attack, players may have problems logging into servers, loading worlds, navigating biomes, using tools, and chatting. General delays, disconnections, timeouts, or server crashes may also occur. These game disruptions can ruin players’ gaming experience, causing financial and reputational losses to server owners, operators, and the broader Minecraft community.
What happens to a Minecraft server during a DDoS attack?
In a DDoS attack, the attacker’s goal is to disrupt a Minecraft server, making it unstable or unavailable to legitimate users by flooding it with malicious traffic until it is overwhelmed. DDoS attacks on Minecraft servers can last from a few seconds to days, depending on their severity and the countermeasures implemented.
Severe attacks can cost players prize money in tournaments, decrease player trust in the server, cause server crashes, or even force servers to be upgraded for better redundancy and resilience against future attacks.
Evidence of an attack
This checklist serves as a handy reference guide when dealing with suspicious network activity that resembles DDoS attacks.
| Symptom | Description | |
| ☐ | Sudden peaks in traffic | Sudden spikes in traffic patterns can be a strong indicator of DDoS activity, as they often involve a large volume of traffic or packets. |
| ☐ | Port congestion | Increased traffic to specific ports in your network infrastructure can also be indicative of DDoS activity. |
| ☐ | Too many requests | Too many connection requests from an IP or IP range, detected by a rate limiter, can signal DDoS activity or brute force attempts, among others. |
| ☐ | Greater use of resources | DDoS attacks are extremely demanding on server resources such as CPU and RAM. |
| ☐ | Unusually slow network | Following sudden spikes or outages, your network connection may slow down and become unusually slow, severely impacting gameplay. |
| ☐ | Unresponsiveness | Depending on the site or type of attack, players may experience latency and delays and may not be able to perform gameplay actions, interact with their biomes, or chat. |
| ☐ | Unavailability | Intensive or extensive DDoS attacks can overwhelm a server’s resources, forcing it to go offline or crash. |
| ☐ | Widespread complaints | Complaints spread within the Minecraft community may indicate that a major DDoS attack is targeting multiple servers simultaneously. |
| ☐ | Increasing billing | Minecraft server owners with pay-as-you-go plans may notice a sudden spike in computing bills or subscription fees. |
If many of these signals converge at any given time for your Minecraft server, there is a high probability that a DDoS attack is underway that requires immediate remediation.
If you are unsure whether an attack is occurring, contact your ISP or host. They should be able to verify whether it is a DDoS attack or not. In some cases, these signals could be symptoms of other cyber attacks or unrelated network problems and will therefore produce false positive results.
Impact on Minecraft servers and the Minecraft community
DDoS attacks significantly affect Minecraft servers, players, server owners, and the entire community. Gameplay disruption isn’t the only concern. An attack that resulted in a player losing significant earnings in a tournament has, in extreme cases, resulted in tragic outcomes with profound emotional impacts, which rippled through the community and reached friends and family. This highlights the need for robust protection and awareness.
DDoS attacks on Minecraft servers can have numerous impacts:
- Poor gaming experience: DDoS attacks cause latency, delays, or disconnections, making Minecraft unplayable and negatively impacting the user experience.
- Imbalance in the game: Rival players could exploit unresponsive servers during a DDoS attack to unfairly gain an advantage over players on the targeted servers.
- Server downtime: Critical to online gaming, server downtime due to intense DDoS attacks makes Minecraft servers unavailable, frustrating players who invest time, effort, energy, and passion into building, exploring, and interacting within the Minecraft environment.
- Financial losses: DDoS attacks lead to potential revenue losses for server owners who rely on donations, premium subscriptions, or in-game purchases. Attackers may demand a fee to scale the attack, but honoring ransom demands invites future attacks.
- Extra charges: Yo-yo DDoS attacks create traffic fluctuations, increasing overall costs for cloud-hosted servers.
- Identity theft: DDoS attacks can be a smokescreen for hacker attacks and identity theft, increasing vulnerability in the event of server unavailability.
- Server ban for innocent parties: Persistent DDoS attacks on shared hosting plans can result in temporary bans for Minecraft servers, affecting both server members and server owners who depend on member revenue for financial support.
- Reputation damage: Persistent DDoS attacks damage the reputation of a Minecraft server, leading to a decline in the server’s popularity and user base.
- Repercussions on the community: Persistent DDoS attacks can cause Minecraft servers to crash, disrupting social interactions and driving players to abandon.
- Conversion costs: Players face tangible and intangible costs when moving to a new server, including the loss of in-game purchases and achievements, subscriptions and relationships.
Examples of recent attacks
Most DDoS attacks on Minecraft servers never make it to the news. Many small-scale attacks target personal or private servers for the reasons discussed above. However, large-scale DDoS attacks are more likely to create press due to their value as a marketing strategy for DDoS protection providers or the real-life consequences that arise from the attack.
The largest Minecraft DDoS attack ever targeted the popular Wynncraft Minecraft server in 2022. A variant of the Mirai botnet launched a two-minute 2.5 Tbps attack using UDP and TCP Flood packets to attack the server , with the goal of disrupting the gameplay of hundreds of thousands of players.
Massive attacks on this scale and the many other attacks on private, smaller servers that attract less attention highlight the need to be wary of Minecraft DDoS attacks. It is therefore essential that server owners, administrators, engineers and hosting providers protect their servers and the users who rely on them. Let’s explore some methods for mitigating DDoS attacks.
Obsidian Walls: How to Protect Minecraft Servers from DDoS Attacks
Basic protective measures
To defend your Minecraft server from DDoS attacks, start with basic security measures:
- Install antivirus software to block malware that could place your server in a botnet.
- Use a VPN to obscure your server’s IP address.
- Secure your SSH connection by changing the SSH port number or switching to key-generated SSH security using PuTTY.
- Implement allowlists or whitelists to allow access only to verified players, and use blacklists to block malicious IPs or players.
- Get a firewall, especially for self-hosted servers.
- Incorporate rate limiting on network devices to manage traffic flow.
- Keep your Minecraft server software and plugins updated to patch vulnerabilities.
It’s important to stay up to date on the latest DDoS tactics, signals, and countermeasures, and make sure your server moderators are well-informed as well. Building a strong, supportive community and promoting a positive gaming environment by vetting new members and monitoring forum chats for threats can deter peer-to-peer DDoS attacks. In case of serious threats, do not hesitate to involve law enforcement or seek legal assistance.
Advanced protection measures
The protection measures above are basic cybersecurity solutions; For a complete defense against DDoS attacks you need a specialized approach like Gcore DDoS Protection. We offer comprehensive real-time protection against DDoS attacks of any size, duration or complexity, ensuring uninterrupted gaming. Created by players, for players, Gcore DDoS Protection provides tailored defense mechanisms, an extremely low false positive rate and dedicated technical support, ensuring your Minecraft server remains protected always, everywhere, in every situation.
By analyzing traffic and customizing protection strategies, we protect your server across all Minecraft versions and plugins. Our powerful infrastructure can handle massive spikes in DDoS traffic with a 110 Tbps capacity CDN. We block attacks from the first query without affecting legitimate traffic, based on the session rather than relying solely on IP addresses.
Diamond Defense: Proven game protection
Prevention is better than cure. According to Gcore Radar and the FBI, the gaming industry is one of the three most attacked industries, and the average DDoS attack in games costs victims up to $25,000 in losses, not taking into account any ransoms. Even for teams with internal IT units, an attack can take a lot of time and effort to perform disaster recovery and much longer to repair a reputation tarnished by all-out DDoS attacks.
Gcore DDoS Protection is a comprehensive and proven service for mitigating DDoS attacks on Minecraft servers. Get a free expert consultation and find out how we can protect your server and save you from the devastating consequences of DDoS attacks. Get started with a free trial to experience the power of Gcore DDoS Protection for yourself.