Hi everyone,
Many of you may have noticed intermittent connectivity problems with our game servers, which have manifested as disconnections or prolonged lag. I wanted to personally make you aware of the current issues we are experiencing and what we are doing to resolve the situation.
For over a year now, we have been the target of numerous DDoS attacks against our game. For those of you who do not know, a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), is an attack directed at an online service such as RuneScape.com, designed to disrupt the website, forums or game by making it completely unavailable, or disrupting traffic from legitimate end users such as yourself. Techniques vary, but essentially a DDoS attack involves overwhelming the online service with malicious traffic. This is - unfortunately - a growing plague within the industry that many online services struggle with, and RuneScape appears to be one of the biggest targets.
Motives for launching these attacks seem to vary, but the end result is the same. The sharp increase in attacks does tie closely with removal of private servers, bots and gold farming, so it would follow that this is in revenge for destroying their businesses. This has also resulted in an increase in immature users at malicious forums like 'bug'd abuse'd' DDoSing and stealing from many individual players, taking credit for RuneScape service outages.
I wanted to take this opportunity to assure you that we have, are and will continue to work tirelessly, preventing as many of these attacks from affecting your gameplay as we can. We have recently made a multi-million pound investment in our global IT infrastructure to deal with the continued attacks and are working with a number of service and security providers to eradicate the issue completely. We are also working closely with worldwide law enforcement agencies to bring the people responsible for these attacks to justice.
I also want to assure all our players that no personal information is at risk as a result of these DDoS attacks.
We will continue to fight this threat and are doing everything in our power to ensure RuneScape.com remains available for you to play 24/7.
Anyone with information to offer on DDoS attacks or their source is welcome to contact us at tipoff@jagex.com. Any information or evidence provided that leads to a successful criminal prosecution of the individuals or organisations behind these attacks will be rewarded with a $10,000.00 bounty.
Thank you for your understanding and continued support.
Mark Gerhard
Jagex CEO
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