Forum

I don't know if these attacks are annoying anyone or not.  Apparently whoever is doing them doesn't much usage of the LOIC and they don't last long.  But, I have some ideas on making it harder for whomever is doing it to work harder doing it.

First thing I'd like people to do is look at the Assist server list and see who may be benefiting - who's left.  Maybe there's a douchebag trying to drive player traffic their way.  The other possibility is that somebody is just being a douchebag and has no interest.

I hate to go to this extreme, but I think I will have to pull server information out of Battletracker to keep IP and port information private.  Same goes for GameTracker and other similar sites as well.  These attacks are targeted towards AA ports using a known problem in the Unreal 2.5 engine.  I would ask that Assist remove both the IP information and Port information from the Assist client.  Individual users do not need them to connect anymore.  The information should stay private within the Assist client.
While some of us may not have the flexibility to change IP addresses, we do have the flexibility to change our ports.  And yes, I know technically a person can still get that information, but would have to go through a hell of a harder time to do so, especially with multiple servers.  I'd rather take the fun out of it for them.

What they seem to be doing is going down a list of multiple servers when they do the attacks.  Where they get that list of ips/ports, I am not sure if it's Battletracker (which publishes XML sources of ips), or if they're going into the assist client and writing/copying the addresses down.  If the address information was blocked from the Assist client, to get information on each server they would have to connect to each server and use networking tools to get the ip/port information.  So, they would have to work harder for their effort.  If it was just a matter of one server, I'd agree with you on that.
This may not even be anyone part of the Assist community.  They are spamming specific AA ports I use, but could be working a list off of Battletracker.  I'm seeing ports 8777 and 1716 (I don't use 1716) being spammed as well.  It may not even be an Assist providing the information.  But we do not use or need specific ip address/port information for connecting to servers anymore.  Assist handles that, so I would think it isn't needed anymore.

There are two GS queries:  One to the server, and one to GameSpy master server.  Which do you refer to?  I thought GS no longer supported AA2 servers and that armyops wasn't sending to the master server anymore - so the query to GS would be out.  The one to the server requires knowing the ip address and the port  to begin with.

for a ddos attack you only need the ip - and this you can get at the server list
or in game

Its easy to find the server IP:port. Servers that aren't on BT list aren't tracked too

yeah shad, you are right. this would be a solution. but therefor the assist own tracking system has to be running because we would not have that much players on non tracked servers.