The recent wave of DDOS attacks on Assetto Corsa Competizione servers, particularly bigger events, has been a big talking point of the SimRacing community for weeks. To avoid potential intruders crashing the servers, Simracing.GP has added new features that should remedy the problem.
Nearly all big esports organizations have fallen victim to the attacks in recent weeks. All faced the same problem: Unknown users who apparently managed to join the servers as spectators activated a script that spammed the in-game chat with indecipherable characters at such high frequency that the servers eventually crashed. Even the second open qualifying for the Simracing.GP Professional Trophy on the Road 2 SimRacing Expo 2022 fell victim to an attack, but still managed to complete the full 6-hour distance on another server. It was not just bigger events, either, as reports of smaller league races being attacked made the rounds as well.
As ACC is the most popular sim on their platform, Simracing.GP has introduced measures to prevent the attacks, mainly by not making servers visible to people who are not involved with the respective events. As a result, setting up and joining events is done differently now, and a spectator tab for events has been introduced.
This means that anyone who is not registered as either a spectator or a driver will not be able to find the server in ACC. Spectators also will have to be added by a community admin so that the risk of unwanted entries there is kept to a minimum.
An additional step to follow now is to be logged into the SGP platform on the same PC that SimRacers intend to join and race the event from, which most users likely are already anyway. The same has been implemented for Assetto Corsa – where a server slot will be occupied by each spectator – as well as RaceRoom. The measures are planned to be introduced for Automobilista 2 as well, though SGP focuses on ironing out the issues the multiplayer implementation for the title still has at the moment.
To read a detailed description including step-by-step instructions on the new set-up and joining process, stop by Simracing.GP’s blog – alternatively, the YouTube tutorial embedded below will help you as well.