Ubisoft Sues Alleged DDoS-for-Hire Service

Game developer Ubisoft has sued the owners of SNG.ONE, an alleged DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) website, claiming that they are behind recent attacks against Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege servers.

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege is a multiplayer game developed and published by Ubisoft. In this multiplayer game, teams of players faced off in online matches. The players are highly competitive and would do anything to win the game, and that includes DDoSing opponents.

Players can win a match if the other party loses its Internet connection, and this is where DDoS-for-hire comes into play. When the server notices that a player exits from the match, for whatever reason, it grants victory to the other team. Even if the Internet connection doesn’t drop, making it unplayable would still be sufficient.

Since people are willing to pay for this kind of service, a small industry operating DDoS services has been flourishing, and Ubisoft alleges that SNG.ONE is one of those services. The service claims to offer penetration testing specifically for DDoS attacks, and they also reportedly offer a firewall solution capable of withstanding such attacks. They only accept payment in Bitcoin.

“Defendants are members of a business enterprise that provides its customers with subscription-based access to software and other online services designed to enable their customers to perpetrate targeted denial-of-service (“DoS”) and distributed denial-of-service (“DDoS”) attacks (the “DDoS Attacks”) on the computer servers that enable R6S players to play and compete in the game (collectively, the “DDoS Services”),” state the legal documents obtained by Polygon.

Ubisoft is asking the courts to shut down the service and is requesting damages. They also named the defendants as Dennis Kruk and Maximilian Kuehl (Germany), Kelvin (Kevin) Uttih (Nigeria), and B.R from the Netherlands.

During the attacks, Ubisoft proactively fought the attackers and made changes to the servers so that the players would not feel the impact of DDoS attackers. The company says it managed to reduce the negative effect on multiplayer matches by 93%.