Exploiters crashing my servers, cause unknown

I would recommend going through the post verification process to bring it to #platform-feedback:website-bugs for it to be noticed more(possibly the staff).

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Well wouldn’t it be Exploit Reports team?

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Based on everything here I’d say it’s definitely an exploiter. Website bugs would not be the proper place either because this is an engine bug or an exploit, and isn’t related to the website. Judging by the fact that he has a script which does crash servers, this is enough of a reason to make an exploit report even if the script isn’t the direct cause of the crashing occuring here.

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This exploit script is public and can crash any server with tools, I do not know how it works because the source is obfuscated.

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Would you mind DMing me the script? I could take a look at it and run it in my sandbox to see what it’s doing.

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They have to leave the server and then the server dies trying to clear all the weld spam.

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The issue is very much in small community games such as Clubs, Cafes and Sword Fighting Clans. The developers behind Custom Duels, a sword-fighting community game, has been reporting this for a very long time. The reason behind these crashes is distributed denial of service(DDoS) attack and I am quite aware of how this is done. Roblox stores the server’s IP on the player’s machine whenever they join a server which can be found quite easily and you know what’s next. These developers have been trying to reach out for help on this very issue and were assured many times that necessary steps will be taken to fix this. However, despite all the efforts, nothing has been done so far.

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This was already suggested numerous times and it doesn’t appear that a backdoor is the issue. You should read prior replies.

Additionally this does seem to be a DDoS attack, like @Wasteds said, it’s not hard to find the IP of a Roblox server. In fact, you can do this through http without even launching the client once. After all, the client requires the IP to connect in the first place. An easy way I know of is to use the netstat command with the -o flag which shows the pid of the program with the active connection. You can simply match up the pid of the Roblox client and find which IPs it’s connecting to.

The fact that a private server did not crash is because these servers are impossible to list unless you have access to them. You can’t join them, you can’t query them, and you can’t get the IP without being teleported there.

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Hi everyone,

The trend of replies here seems to be pointing to either a weld spam or DDoS attack against my game. In both scenarios, it’s impossible for me as a developer to mitigate or stop these attacks. I’ve already implemented in sufficient weld spam countermeasures and they’ve worked fine in the past so I’m not sure what method this exploiter is using.

How do I go about contacting Roblox about this? Emailing isn’t really an option and it seems as though my engine bugs report went unnoticed… maybe I didn’t wait long enough?

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Out of curiosity, why aren’t more popular games targeted, or, if they are, why don’t they go down as easily as these games if this issue is shared across the platform?

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Apparently this game is a target of these server crash exploits as well, no idea what’s going on.

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I’ll try and expand my weld spam detection to places outside of the workspace and see if it stops these unknown attacks the exploiter is performing.

Again, I removed every single remote event from the game, rebooted all servers and the crashing still persisted, essentially ruling out remote event spam (which I already have detection for) so I’ll definitely try expanding my weld spam coverage and seeing if this is indeed the case.

The exploiter has taken frequent breaks so when he does start crashing the servers again I’ll post an update whether this worked or not.

If anyone else has another idea or advice I’ll be looking into it, thanks everyone.

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Does the server instantly shut down (ie “This game has shutdown”) or does it take at least a few seconds and freeze everyone in place? Because if so, that definitely sounds like they’re replicating a bunch of welds (ie 60,000 of them) to lag out the server gradually.

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The entire server freezes and activity ceases for about 3 or 4 seconds then everyone gets kicked with the message “Please check your internet connection and try again”.

If you try and rejoin said server it will freeze at the loading screen and blur as visualized in a post further up.

It seems as though he has the ability to take down all my servers almost instantaneously which is really strange.

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If I had to guess it’s most likely due to their large server count. It’s extremely difficult (and I’m sure this would show up on Roblox’s radar if this happened) for servers to get taken down through a DDoS attack since they’re are just so many. I’ve heard of actual DDoS attacks happening on Roblox in small communities, and I’ve even seen software being developed by people for this specific purpose.

Also, @Meta_Data number one would mean that servers within the server list would quickly be gone, for number two a player would need to actually join, which has been proven to be incorrect as far as I’ve read, and same with three. The author of the original post said that they were logging player joins. If #2 was the case than player joins would show up. Additionally, we’re waiting on a one player server test to see if servers are going down with only one player, which would 100% verify a DDoS attack.

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DDoSing a roblox game server would take a ridiculous amount of resources. Resources that no one would have.

It’s more than likely the tool crash script that was leaked a few days ago. And someone found a way to make the welds replicate without going in workspace. (bypassing the workspace.DescendantAdded check)

I also do not believe for a single moment that they can crash the server without being inside of it.

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This is incorrect. DoSing a Roblox game server takes just as many resources as crashing the server from in game, such as Weld based crashes. (This would actually definitely take more resources, however I guess I meant that based on my knowledge this would take similar resources to the Weld crash). Additionally, this is a soft crash, not a hard crash. The server is clearly overloaded, and because it was reporting 0 players as shown above, the server did not simply crash, it’s heavily overloaded. Like I said, there have been numerous tools developed for the sole purpose of DDoSing a Roblox game server and they’ve existed for years. They aren’t common, but they exist.

Additionally, if you have the IP of the Roblox server you can send any data to it. There are projects which have reverse engineered the Roblox protocol and implement their own clients, proxies, etc. It’s entirely possible that someone has found a way to overload servers without initializing a player client, and this would really just be a DoS attack, or possibly a DDoS.

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Yeah I always found it really odd that I was the first person to enter a server, had a player join detector, and even had a workspace:DescendantAdded detector and nothing showed up in either of them while the server crashed. Nothing even showed up in network stats, ping, or script activity…

If you go back and look at the server I was in it only shows me inside it but you can’t join it without freezing your Roblox client pictured above.

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when you rejoin after getting this, does it say that you cant join cause your playing from another device?

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error

This is the error it displays when the server crashes.

If you try and rejoin your client freezes at the loading screen before an error screen can be displayed.

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