Many Jedi Academy and Jedi Outcast servers across numerous server hosts and providers have fallen subject to a massive effort by malicious users seeking to exploit the "getstatus" command in the Quake III engine in order to target dedicated server executables, such as jampded.exe. The objective of the malicious users is to turn dedicated servers into complicit slaves to a botnet, an enormous network of compromised computers that are queried repeatedly to send back massive chunks of data to a victim. This is an example of a Distributed Reflection Denial of Service (DRDoS) attack.

Our research has led us to uncover that dedicated servers for Quake III engine games, such as the Call of Duty series, Jedi Academy, Jedi Outcast are the ones being targeted. This is an intelligent effort, not a random one, as specific names of game server executables are the target.

After much consultation with our colleagues and competitors, we have determined that there is no solution available for this exploit -- other than to conceal the name of the server executable. We have done this by renaming jampded.exe for all of our customers to name comprised of random characters. This has, so far, guaranteed that all our customers' servers will no longer be subject to the attack -- as "jampded.exe" simply does not appear to be there.

The only unfortunate downside is that our Jedi Academy and Jedi Outcast customers' servers will no longer respond to query on Xfire, which targets jampded.exe. However, we guarantee that all servers are completely functional and disturbance-free, and are still readily accessible from the in-game server browser. While this solution does not fix the problem for us or any of our competitors, we feel it is the best solution we can offer at a time when no support is being lent to the Quake III engine.

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