Tuesday, August 4

DDoS attack temporarily takes down $18M Dota 2 e-sports tourney

SEATTLE—The online components of The International, the largest annual e-sports tournament for video game Dota 2 with a prize pool of more than $18 million, have been creaking and suffering a bit since the event's finals began on Monday. On the first day, the major issue was interruption of the video streams from the event, with the game itself appearing to avoid trouble.

But on Tuesday, those issues were kicked up a notch by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack aimed directly at the finals' gameplay servers as opposed to any tertiary systems. Presenter Paul "ReDeYe" Chaloner, speaking at The International's English-speaking broadcast booth, confirmed to a thousands-strong Key Arena crowd that gameplay in Tuesday's first match, between the teams Evil Geniuses and Complexity Gaming, had been disrupted by a DDoS attack. The outage lasted for nearly two hours.

This vulnerability stands out in particular because the gameplay itself, as opposed to any supporting systems, was targeted and taken down, implying that the game was not running in local or LAN mode. We cannot find official word as to why the game's core content isn't run in a wholly offline or LAN mode or whether the DDoS attack somehow targeted a crucial, non-gameplay portion of The International.

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