DDoS stands for Distributed Denial Of Service. It is an attack from a large network of computers. This is particularly common for web servers and hosting services. So while I was hosting a game servers community, I needed to make sure I was safe from this attack.

I took the initiative to code my own DDoS detection / prevention software. This project took a lot of patience, I needed low level access to networking I had to used external C++ libraries. Using them and linking them to java is something I’m unfamiliar with so it took a lot of figuring out. In the end it works fantastically and I am very happy I put in the work for it.

The software monitors the packet output from every ip address and logs the time and date a certain ip sends an obsessive amount of data or a very large amount of clients are connected (TCP). It then has the option to temporarily block those IP address from sending any more data to stop the problem by adding an iptables entry. I ran this program on my server for a long time and managed to catch and stop multiple hackers and protected my servers.