Joystiq posted a tip earlier this week about denial of service attacks occuring on Xbox Live. BBC News has the full scoop, reporting that more and more people are being maliciously booted from Live recently, probably thanks to packet flood tools that are being shared by hackers.
Microsoft is "investigating" the use of the tools and said those caught using them would be banned from Xbox Live.
Now, I'm no expert...but I'm pretty sure that (a). these "attackers" don't really care, MS, and (b). it's going to be darn tough to track them down.
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For $20 (£13) some Xbox Live hackers will remotely access a customer's PC and set up the whole system so it can be run any time they need it.
Some offer low rates to add compromised machines to a botnet and increase the amount of data flooding a particular IP address.
Defending against the attack could be tricky, said Mr Boyd: "There's no real easy solution to this one."
Actually, Mr. Boyd...there is: play co-op.
These denial of service attacks are pretty vicious; they don't just knock out someone's connection for a few seconds -- they're designed to maintain a flood of data that will shut down your ISP connection until customer service techs can restore it.
We've been told by the government to prepare for the worst. Talk radio is preaching doomsday scenarios every day. We've even seen zombie apocalypse warnings on the freeway! So what can you do to prevent the disaster of a pathetic prepubescent Halo 3 junkie crashing your internet connection via Xbox Live?
Easy.