Steam Platform Encounters DDoS Attack, Speculations Triggered by the Popularity of "Black Myth: Wukong"

On the evening of August 24th, Steam, the world's largest gaming platform, encountered severe technical problems, causing domestic and foreign players to be unable to log in normally. This incident quickly became a hot topic on social media. Although some players speculated that this failure was caused by the excessive number of online players of the recently popular game "Black Myth: Wukong", according to the official statement of the PWA (Perfect World Arena) platform, in fact, Steam suffered a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

Since its release on August 20th, "Black Myth: Wukong" has quickly become a phenomenal game. Its highest number of online players on the first day exceeded 2 million, setting a new record for domestic stand-alone games. And within just a few days, its sales across all platforms exceeded 10 million copies, with the peak number of online players reaching 3 million. However, just as the popularity of this game was continuously rising, the Steam platform suffered a DDoS attack.

Li Weichen, the vice president of technology at Knownsec, pointed out in an interview that DDoS attacks are very common in the gaming industry, especially when a blockbuster game is launched. Hackers disrupt game services through such attacks, forcing game developers or platforms to miss the best profit-making opportunities and using this as leverage to obtain illegal gains. The attacker's profit models are diverse, including direct extortion, influencing stock prices, and demanding compensation from competitors.

Li Weichen emphasized that although DDoS attacks have a long history, they are still very effective attack methods, and there are mature SaaS services available for people to use. Such services are inexpensive, and only a small amount of cost is needed to paralyze the target system, causing huge economic losses.

It is extremely difficult to completely defend against DDoS attacks because this often requires both sides to invest a large amount of bandwidth resources. Most Internet enterprises do not prepare excessive redundant resources in advance to deal with potential attacks, so they are often helpless when encountering attacks. Currently, the most effective defense measure is to rely on the anti-D services provided by cloud defense service providers. Cloud defense platforms can mobilize the resources of the entire network to resist hacker attacks, and their available bandwidth ranges from several Tbps to hundreds of Tbps, far exceeding the general attack scale.

Game developers usually cooperate with cloud defense service providers to ensure that their business is not affected by super-large-scale DDoS attacks, and take preventive measures such as backup domain names and servers. In addition, cloud native technology and container technology also improve the elastic expansion ability of the business, which helps to quickly allocate resources to deal with traffic peaks.

According to the Gcore report, DDoS attacks increased by 46% in the first half of 2024. Among them, the gaming and gambling industries were the most affected, accounting for 49% of the total number of attacks. Given the fierce competition and high economic benefits in this industry, these fields are particularly vulnerable to attacks. With the continuous development of the gaming industry, strengthening network security protection is crucial for ensuring user experience and maintaining market order.