Rainbow Six Siege sees 93 percent drop in DDoS attacks amid crackdown

What you need to know

• Ubisoft has scaled efforts to counter DDoS attacks in Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege.
• The developer now reports a 93 percent drop in DDoS frequency, following gameplay, technical, and legal responses.

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege has tackled a sizeable pool of issues, seemingly on the rise as popularity soars. Ubisoft has targeted hackers, exploits, and toxicity in recent patches, with the latest Operation Ember Rise expansion facing an uptick in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks across the multiplayer shooter. Flooding servers with malicious requests to throw multiplayer matches offline, it arrived with significant implications on the skill-based ranking system.

DDoS attacks are far from new to competitive multiplayer shooters, though gained widespread attention with Ember Rise. Ubisoft outlined plans to combat attackers, including gameplay, technical, and legal action. Alongside improvements to how the game handles attacks, the studio also issued title-wide bans to perpetrators.

Taking to the Rainbow Six blog, Ubisoft has announced a 93 percent drop in DDoS and DoS attacks, following its initial response in September. "While this is a huge improvement, we are committed to continuing our work on strengthening the network infrastructure to prevent further attacks," said Ubisoft. "We are also improving our automated monitoring that detects people initiating attacks to populate DDoS Ban Waves."

Over a month has passed since first taking action, rolling out game updates, and backend tweaks to counter DDoS attacks. Ubisoft has also made headlines for taking legal action against prominent attackers and cheat makers while continuing efforts with Microsoft to better adapt for further occurrences. And now surpassing 50 million players, the value of maintaining the title's overall health proves more valuable than ever.