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Originally Posted by SitandSpin
I'm not sure if this is the right thread for this, but I've heard of players getting DDOS'd before, where a user's internet will not work for a time despite the computer itself operating normally.
Last night I was on about 8 SnG tables when my internet crapped out. My computer didn't freeze up, I didn't get a "Blue Screen of Death"; my internet simply stopped working.
Of course, throughout the years of playing online poker I've had the internet go out on occasion, but never like this. I restarted the computer and everything was fine, although of course by the time I got back on the site I had already auto-folded out of a couple of hypers.
Before restarting the computer I tried to attach my phone's internet to my PC, as I've successfully done once or twice before, but nothing happened this time.
I actually ran pretty well while being disconnected, lol. I got 2nd in a 6m hyper and "tied" for 2nd in another. Busted out of another one or two, loldonkaments ...
I'm pretty computer illiterate and genuinely don't know if this is how that works. Google wasn't a great help.
This happens to be right up my wheel house.
So what an attacker of a DDoS attack would need to know is what your IP address is, and what path of internet routers you need to take to get to Global's servers.
The internet is designed, by its very nature, to work even though part of it is broken. The original idea is if part of our country was nuked, we still could communicate with the rest of the country. Lose VA and NY and FL and CA could all still communicate. Because of this requirement, routes are established between routers on the internet that know, "I take path A unless path A is down, and then I take path B, and if it is down, I take path C...." and on and on it goes.
Okay, so how does this apply to you? Well as you get closer to your house, and closer to Global's servers, there are less and less routers than can carry the traffic. Because as you get closer to the destination, its less likely there are multiple routers that get to you. In fact, all of us normally have a single point of failure router. Its your the cable modem you get from your ISP. If it breaks, you don't get internet. Can you break someone's router? Sure. Just unplug it, or give it a good shock. But then you need to be onsite to make that happen.
So how do I break you from remote? By sending so much traffic to your single router, it overwhelms your router. Your router sends and receives traffic constantly, but it is normally pretty low amounts. What I do is send a lot of traffic and so that makes it a Denial of Service (DOS) attack. But because we have seen this problem before we began to fix certain problems with the system. We would ask routers, upstream from you, to block the bad traffic, and you would magically be fixed. So then the bad guys got smarter, and started sending the traffic from LOTS of locations, and then the good guys couldn't block the traffic fast enough, which is what makes it a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS)
I would love to tell you this is super complicated, but it just isn't. Viruses on computers used to break them, and then the bad guys realized they could make money with your computer. They "rent" out your computer to the people who want to make these DDoS attacks happen and cause your internet to help flood out someone else's internet.
Now your question is "Awesome, thanks for the long drawn out history, but what do I do about it?" Glad you asked. So first you need to know is it on just your side or is the attack happening at Global. You will know this because if it is Global's side, EVERYONE will be having problems, not just you. So if you aren't seeing the threads pop up here on 2+2, it is likely just on your side.
If it is on your side, what can you do? Have backup internet. This could be a MiFi kind of device that you get from a cell company, or another provider that you have a separate router for, and if you go down on one, you just switch to the other. I would think the chances are pretty low they would know and be able to take you down on both ways you connect. You can always pickup and go to the library or another internet connection as well if that is feasible.
They will have to know what your IP is though in order to make this happen, but I am aware of people doing this to each other on minecraft to win a game, and there isn't money at stake there. So I believe it is within the realm of possibilities someone was targeting you. I can't say for sure, I would need to see the traffic logs to really understand what happened. But it is also likely something you should keep an eye out for.
Hopefully this helpful, and feel free to ask any questions that you might have.