‘Dark And Darker’ servers targeted by a titanic DDoS attack

Dark And Darker – the dungeon crawler rising through the ranks of the most popular PC games – was hit with a monumental distributed denial-of-service (or DDoS) attack on August 8.

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Coincidentally, this attack was launched after the game’s latest update. “We are experiencing a concerted DDoS attack. Because of this, it seems that our response will be require additional tuning. Accordingly, the maintenance will take a little longer than expected,” explained developer Ironmace in a post to X.

DDoS attacks are carried out through an unusual volume of traffic from numerous sources, stopping the target from effectively identifying and mitigating the overload of information. In this instance, the attack was over “600 Gbps” according to the developer, which is seismic on the scale of possible disruption.

As a result, Dark And Darker servers were compromised, preventing players from logging into the game. While Ironmace used this onslaught as an opportunity to strengthen its servers, it isn’t known who was behind the attack.

Dark And Darker has been at the heart of a string of controversies since it was announced in 2022. Earlier this year, publisher Nexon claimed that the game was built out of one of its own projects, P3, and that the ex-employees that founded Ironmace have stolen its intellectual property.

Ironmace rebuked these allegations and said that Dark And Darker was the creation of the team’s own code as well as the inclusion of Unreal Engine assets. However, the developer’s offices were raided in search of evidence to support Nexon’s case and the game was delisted from Steam following a DMCA notice from the publisher.

This tug of war culminated in a copyright infringement lawsuit against Ironmace filed in Washington, USA, and the developer accused Nexon of “[bending] copyright law well past its breaking point in order to keep Dark And Darker out of the public’s hands”.

However, all of Nexon’s claims were dismissed without prejudice by the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington on August 17.

In other gaming news, the door is not completely closed on a possible expansion for Baldur’s Gate 3, and the director has suggested a potential setting in its timeline.

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