Rainbow Six Siege DDoS attacks down 93% after Ubisoft protections

There’s been a massive decrease in the amount of server hacks on Rainbow Six Siege since Ubisoft initiated a strategy to combat denial-of-services and distributed denial-of-service (DoS/DDoS) attacks. Taking a number of measures, including having less matches on each server and monitoring network traffic, has yielded considerable results, making the shooter much more stable.

In a report from Ubisoft, DoS/DDoS attacks are down 93% since many of the precautions outlined were taken. Ban waves have been introduced to detect perpetrators, servers now take on less than three matches each, punishment for quitting too many matches – a side-effect of players caught in an attack, known as the escalating abandon sanction – has been disabled, and there’s heightened network traffic monitoring.

Legal action against a number of offenders, and people hosting and offering the services behind these attacks, is being pursued. While anyone caught has been banned, the report states that “prominent” attackers and cheat-makers are the ones facing legal threat. Finally, Ubisoft are working with the Microsoft Azure team to develop broader solutions that will provide “a substantial impact on DDoS, DoS, Soft Booting, and server stressing.”

This plan was revealed back in September, when hacks had become regular enough to necessitate game-wide action. Cheating players were slowing matches down via manufactured lag in order to force opponents to quit. Such behavior spiked around the start of the Operation Ember Rise season.

The BBC interviewed one of the purveyors of these cheats a while back, who claimed top ranked players are among his customers. He made £1,500 a week from selling the hacks, and at the time said his work wasn’t detected by the game – odds are his methods are now ironed out.