Crashing Servers Issue

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Hey everyone,

Today, I’m bringing an issue that is kind of sadly happening to a lot of small developers recently. (You might excuse the fact I’m new to making Forum Posts)

Recently, a lot of small developers are getting threatened to takedown their game, or give something in exchange or else their player count will be reduced to zero. (all their playerbase gone)
Basically, let me explain, imagine you’re a small developer with a game averaging around 200 players. Your game is doing great, and you build an active playerbase. Then, you get threatened by a random, asking you something in exchange or else he would crash all of your game’s servers and reduce your playercount to zero. This is exactly what is happening to me right now, and a lot of other small developers.

Firstly, as you might say, no, this is not a game/developement issue. This is worse than that and this can happen to anyone, even if your game is the best developed game ever.

I’ve dug my way around those Roblox crashers, and turns out there is many exploits that can crash any Roblox server they’d like, just with the server IP they can grab by joining a specific server, they can get a “botnet” to crash the whole server in just a minute, even under a minute sometimes.

This is a Roblox server issue, not a game issue. I’ve tried to reach out to Roblox Support about it, so Roblox devs could eventually look into it. But nothing. I’ve heard this has been happening to other small developers since last year. Yet, no fixes. A lot of us are getting blackmailed, and it could be you one day if you make it to that step of developement.

Hence, why I am creating this Forum Post. Please share this as much as you can, the only way to get this heard by Roblox officials is by sharing this. There is literally no way out other than this. (sorry if I make this seem dramatic, but it kinda is knowing this is breaking my playerbase more and more everyday)

I really need you guys’ help on this. This is not okay and I really don’t want this to happen to even more innocent and small developers who are just trying to make their game get heard.

If you have more questions, don’t hesitate to leave me a comment and I’ll do my best to answer it with what I know.

Many thanks,
gauthee.

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It turns out that my code was incorrect and I have since fixed it. The issue I had was not Roblox related.

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Hi!

Thanks for getting back to me with this. Yeah I saw this happening but I doubt this is the solution to my issue. I really know what those are since I’ve seen footage, etc… And they’re actual crashers with botnets that quite literally boot off the server by just having the Roblox server IP.
I know this wouldn’t work anymore back in 2017 all the way to 2021. But for some reason, Roblox decided to revert whatever they did and now it’s possible again. It’s literally just like DDOS but in a more sophisticated way with hacked/ratted computers, and/or proxies. (temporary Internet addresses/IPs)

What I’m trying with this Forum Post is to get Roblox to get a good security for the servers cause it’s really annoying for us small developers who quite literally can get blackmailed over this and lose our whole playerbase.

But thanks so so much for trying to help, I really appreciate it! :slight_smile:

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I’ve previously been helpful on this issue with a trick I learned from the creator of Framed! - Roblox many years ago

I suggest making it to where you have to join a game within your game by using HTTP requests. At least back then the IP of the server only existed for the main game and any games within that game it didn’t log the server IP of. I believe this should help you out and let me know if it works for you!

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This is a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, not something related to the game engine.

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Please I would really appreciate if you could stop replying to me. Thank you. I am already aware of that and my solution makes it so that they cannot easily grab the IP address of the game server that they use to DDoS attack it.

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No need to get offended, your solution doesn’t stop DDoS attacks, they can still get server IPs.

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Clients get the server IP when joining. This is a fact.

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Why make a fool of yourself? That’s the location. Server IP is a number.

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image

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Rogue Lineage had a simillar issue i think, its servers got crashed alot and what they did was make the main game a placeholder and teleport them to the real game

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You get the IP of every server you join, otherwise how would you play the game?

Do you have more information on how these attacks work? Are they automated? If they are, then that might work.

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you dont get server ips, its Job Ids, every server has an ID attached to it, not the IP, those IDs are readonly

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No that’s not what I’m talking about, clients need an IP to make a connection to, that’s what you receive every time you join a game.

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Exactly. The only way he would be able to prove me wrong is if he shows a video of getting the server IP address within the real game of a placeholder. All he did was get the server location of a placeholder. My solution is completely valid until proven otherwise.

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The server’s IP address is not given to you. Roblox purposefully abstracts the networking layer in order to preserve cloud integrity, and security. Direct server IPs are not accessible to developers or players.

Roblox servers are hosted on cloud server that is dispersed across providers andl areas. Roblox’s ability to manage millions of users at once without requiring dedicated server management from the developer is partly due to this configuration.

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Okay since you claim to know all about botnets and game servers, how do you think you connect to a game?
A jobId won’t work, how will your ISP and networking hardware know what to do with that?

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image
(this isn’t the server IP, I know, but you get the gist of it, it’s elsewhere in the logs)
That doesn’t mean they can get around the actual physical limitations of networking infrastructure.
You still need an IP address to connect to.

What they do prevents one attack from affecting every part of the infrastructure, but an individual server assigned to an IP can still be vulnerable.

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While the servers indeed run on an IP Address at a low level, the network security layers prevent direct access to it, honestly i believe if there was such a breach it would’ve been patched by now, but i dont believe it has something to do with server ips, some guy i knew had an exploit to revert data and crash specific players, its a roblox engine issue not the cloud

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Can you provide clarification on this? This doesn’t explain much.

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