servers are still down while we work to fix the DDoS sabotage
— Among Us 🚀 (@AmongUsGame) March 26, 2022
they may come on/off but will update u when we think they're stable, sorry!!! pic.twitter.com/vMmb74ttbJ
Among Us servers seem to have suffered sabotage bad enough they still remain offline after almost four days of repairs.
According to the Official Among Us Twitter Page, the game's servers were still down due to the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDOS) attack last Friday.
However, there are signs that servers will be back up anytime soon.
Among Us DDOS Attack Details
The DDOS attack on the Among Us servers happened on the afternoon of March 25. This forced game developer Innersloth to take its North American and European Servers offline to solve the problem, per PC Gamer.
As such, players from the affected servers were unable to connect and play the sneak-and-stab stimulator at all. The prolonged duration of the DDOS attack also means that North American and European Among Us players are still unable to play the game to this day and in the near future.
Gaming on Phone mentioned that someone with malicious intent deliberately targeted the game's servers, which is not the first time in the Among Us' history.
Innersloth mentioned in its latest update that while the servers are working, they are only partially online as they may turn on and off, causing players from the affected servers to successfully get in a lobby but only to be booted out shortly after, per Kotaku.
Among Us was previously hacked in 2020 when a hacker filled the game's lobbies with bots that repeatedly spammed messages to subscribe to the hacker's YouTube channel. The messages also mentioned that they "will kill your device" if their instructions were not followed. The bots would then sign off with "Trump 2020."
Players who did get into a lobby at that time would eventually be despawned and left in a black room before being disconnected.
Contributors of iTech Post will update this article once word gets out that the Innersloth servers are fully restored to working order.
What Is a DDOS Attack?
A DDOS attack is an attack that involves overwhelming a target website with fake traffic using a botnet, per Imperva. These kinds of attacks do not attempt to breach a security perimeter, but to make a website or server unavailable to legitimate users. As Among Us players and Innersloth found out, it could also be used as a distraction for other illegal activities and to take down security devices.
Other signs of a DDOS attack are a flood of traffic from users who share a single, behavioral profile (device type, geolocation, web browser version), an unexplained surge in requests to a single page or endpoint, and odd traffic patterns like spikes at odd hours of the day or unnatural patterns, per Cloud Flare.
To combat a DDOS attack, Radware advises people to notify stakeholders and security providers of the attack and its details and activate countermeasures against it, such as IP-based Access Control Lists to block all traffic coming from attack sources.
A dedicated DDOS protection tool can also be a lifesaver as it gives people the widest coverage against such attacks.
Lastly, people should assess their defenses' performance and see if there is a need for revision on their defense.
