Ubisoft takes Rainbow Six: Siege DDoS attack providers to court

By Aaron Mamiit January 19, 2020

Ubisoft filed a lawsuit against the owners of SNG.ONE, a website that allegedly provides distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege.

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To address frequent DDoS attacks against Rainbow Six: Siege, which causes multiplayer matches to lag and servers to crash by overloading them with too much information, Ubisoft implemented a plan against them in September 2019. The frequency of the DDoS attacks plunged by 93% afterward, according to Ubisoft, and it is now looking to take another major step in securing a victory against the disruptive practice.

The lawsuit, filed in California, lists several individuals as defendants, as Ubisoft takes the source of Rainbow Six: Siege‘s DDoS problems to court. The website that they operate, which sells subscriptions for about $30 per month or $300 for “lifetime” access, offers clients the ability to “test” security by ordering a DDoS attack, causing games to crash and kicking players from servers. These services are abused, targeting not only Ubisoft’s servers for Rainbow Six: Siege, but also for other games such as Epic Games’ Fortnite, Electronic Arts’ FIFA 20, and Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

The lawsuit also claims that the defendants taunted Ubisoft for the damage that their DDoS attacks have done to Rainbow Six: Siege, such as through a now-deleted tweet of Bart Simpson repeatedly writing “We will ban every DDoSer.” Ubisoft also claimed that the defendants uploaded a fake seizure notice on their website that said Microsoft and Ubisoft had taken over it, which they admitted they did “in order to get Ubisoft to admit that they have a problem.”

In addition to the closure of SNG.ONE, Ubisoft is seeking damages and fees for the harm that the defendants have caused to the company and Rainbow Six: Siege players, as the attacks have at times rendered the game unplayable.

Ubisoft is not shying away from launching legal action against those who are damaging its games and their communities. In October last year, the company filed a lawsuit against a Rainbow Six: Siege cheat maker MizuSoft, about a month after the underage hacker behind its operations bragged about his earnings in an interview with the BBC.

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