Alright, so I decided to “mob the show servers” – basically, flood them with a ton of traffic to see what would happen. Sounds fun, right? Well, it was, and I learned a thing or two along the way. Here’s how it all went down.
Getting Started
First, I needed a target. I picked a small, kind of obscure online game I used to play. Nothing too big, just something I knew wouldn’t totally break if I poked it a bit. I remember this particular game and have seen it around so, I felt a bit familiar with it. So I figured I could get a hold of their server details without too much hassle.
The Setup
I spun up a few virtual machines on a cloud provider. Nothing fancy, just the cheapest ones I could find. I didn’t want to spend a fortune on this little experiment. I think I ended up with, like, five of them? It was an overkill but, I just wanted to go all out.
Next, I needed some way to generate traffic. I’m no coding whiz, so I grabbed a simple script I found online. It basically just sends a bunch of requests to a server. I tweaked it a little bit to fit my needs – you know, pointed it at the game server, set the number of requests, that kind of stuff. This did the trick for the most part!
Showtime (Mob Time!)
- I fired up the script on each of my virtual machines.
- At first, nothing much happened. The game seemed to be holding up fine.
- But then, I cranked up the number of requests. A lot.
- And…bam! The server started to slow down.
- Players started complaining in the game chat about lag. Classic.
- Eventually, the server just gave up. It went down. Mission accomplished!
What I Learned
It’s actually pretty easy to overwhelm a server if you throw enough traffic at it. Of course, this was a small game server, so I didn’t expect it to be super robust. But it showed me how important it is to have good protection against these kinds of “attacks”. I’m sure the big guys, like the major gaming platforms, have all sorts of fancy defenses in place. This experiment did provide some insights!
Also, it was kind of fun! I felt like a supervillain for a few minutes there. But, you know, a supervillain who only targets small, forgotten game servers. I wouldn’t recommend doing this to anything important, though. Don’t be a jerk!
Anyways after I saw that the server went down, I shut down my script immediately. It was fun to watch for a little while but, I didn’t want to cause more trouble than the experiment was worth.
Disclaimer: Don’t do this to anything you don’t own or have permission to test. It’s not cool, and you could get into trouble.
