Yeah I know spoofing, Im just saying the address resolved to and amazonaws server, the ip got sent to amazon security, and all is still good here.
And Im just telling people with similar issues that they might want to scrutinize there logs and see if such thing is happening to them as well…
I was running a system on the internet before Al Gore invented it (and if you answer back that Al Gore didnt invent the internet Im gonna slap you with a wet Tuna). While Im not a schooled network engineer, Ive been there and done that over the years. Ran a quite successfully a 16000 person ISP for a number of years, and have worn many hats in my career from Tech Support to systems design to security…
I had a feeling this was happening, I looked up my router logs after playing a little while ago, I noted the Dos Attacks. I had not quite stutters, but a steady skip in frames, I have turned off “multiplayer,” in settings for now to bring back my FPS. I also noticed certain times of day when “multiplayer,” is on and there are a good fill of players my FPS isn’t affected.
I suppose a busy multiplayer/live traffic day might look like a ddos attack when in fact it’s just many other aircraft and their ATC updating your instance of msfs2020 with location etc.
I had been meaning to ask. What makes you think, looking at your logs, that these are DOS attacks? Does your firewall run some IPS code, or are you interpreting what you see?
@hobanagerik It literally says and identifies that they’re DOS Attacks but probably a false positive due to the activity. My logs are showing the time stamps for multiple hits, and oddly enough, match in time that “skipping” in my frame rate.
Probably all comes down to hosting costs and capacity/bandwidth over their own Azure system (I have no idea - it could be other reasons that decided).
To me, all this is unsettling for the future of the sim. At over 120GB just for the download plus all the large updates, fixes, and data streaming while flying, data costs have got to be huge. All speculation but that Microsoft is using others for data streaming means hard ongoing costs and cash out the door that continually eat away at the profit from the initial FS2020 sale.
But a DDOS attack doesn’t push data packets per se. The way a DDOS works is a bunch of connection requests get sent that never get completed or closed. The host under attack has to allocate memory and tasks to each request and that can use up all resources on a host and make it unable to respond to legitimate requests. The host has to wait until they time out and then deprovision resources that were allocated and clean up afterwards killing processes and deallocating memory. The list of connections in process grows and grows and the host gets paralyzed if it can’t tear down the connections faster than they come in. That’s why the first D - distributed - you need lots of requests coming in fast to overwhelm a host.
Strictly speaking Microsoft doesn’t own all the data that is being used by the sim.
The live air traffic and live weather data for example is likely the cause of some of the AWS server activity.
Covid and remote work is also reported to have caused an increase in demand and MS are in fact in the process of expanding their capability so some of this may also be temporary rental to meet this unexpected demand while their own systems come online.
I see large data transfers associated with Akamai and an IP directly registered to MS so this is likely the Bing + Photogrammetry.
I did a packet sniffing a few months ago. AWS is use as CDN services I believe. If you block AWS traffic, you will certainly block important part of the sims.
The more important question, and probably been discussed elsewhere on these forums already: given the heavy dependency on (multi vendor) cloud services, when MS decides to not support the game anymore how much of the game will function, if at all, when these services are discontinued?
When MS decides not to support the game anymore it’ll be because the XBox HHD Flight Simulator will have been launched by then. Home Holo-Deck Flight Simulator will be TRULY immersive, don’t ask me how I know…