ESEA DDoS Update
 Type: ESEA News
 Posted 2 days ago
 Eric "lpkane" Thunberg

While we have made a concerted effort not to say much publicly on the issue of the ongoing Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that have persisted since January, I wanted to take a moment to update everyone on where we stand, and the progress we have made thus far.

 On the investigation front, we presently have an open case with the FBI and have been feeding them as much information as we can including names, addresses, payment information, and copious amounts of log data for months now. Through the diligent work by our most senior employees, cooperation from federal and local law enforcement, ISPs, local businesses, and particularly school systems, we have obtained detailed personal information for ESEA user k3u, who is responsible for the bulk of the attacks. In the real world, beyond being quite pale, the user in question has a last name of Quintiliano and lives in Somerville, MA. We have his full name, full address, phone number, information on his relatives (as well as all sorts of other fun information) and have been giving a steady stream of it to the agent who's taken up our case. We also plan on continuing to publicly release additional information as long as the attacks persists.

 Additional efforts and progress have also been made in tracking down ESEA user mika who has made no secret of the fact that he is also involved in the attacks. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the crimes we've provided evidence for (namely child pornography) I cannot legally discuss this particular investigation publicly -- but trust that it will most definitely be a satisfying outcome.

 While the above legal process will undoubtedly yield the expected results, it will still take time. To that end, we've been working aggressively behind the scenes on the defensive front to beef up our infrastructure in order to better mitigate various sorts of attacks and support more traffic in general. Over the past few weeks I've completed the process of migrating our web services to Amazon EC2 for increased computing and bandwidth resources, and in doing so have improved the infrastructure behind the website to be seamlessly load balanced across a scalable number of server instances. In addition, JaguaR has worked to rewrite the Client server so that it also can be load balanced in a variety of locations to provide as much redundancy as we need which means, for everyone reading at home, theoretically eliminating Client disconnect errors in the near future. We've also been working hard on ways to harden and better protect the game servers themselves, with more information to come on that front soon.

 In the end, we understand how frustrating this can be for our customers, and appreciate the patience and support shown throughout this entire ordeal. The longer the attacks continue, the more data we collect, the stronger the cases with federal and local law enforcement grow, the quicker everything draws to a close. This is our full time occupation, we're paid extremely well for our efforts, we have drastically superior resources, smarter talent, and quite simply aren't going away and have absolute confidence in our eventual victory.