People Crashing Your TFC Connection/Game... ?

[Dave_07]

Hey All,

Just recently I was in a TFC game/server and a "Player" enters the game. He starts team shooting, rocketing snipers of the sniper deck, armour stripping and just generly beeing really abusive. So as you would expect alot of peeps begin to get peed off with him so I start a kick vote on him and that really sets him of on a rampage...
However even tho I think he may have been cheating I manage to hold my own against him and he gets even more peed off.
I end up switching to the same team he is on, only to find him in the respawn, when he says this to me, and i quote "brb, gonna fix u man, u f****r". So i watch him and he is just standing there dead still in the respawn. He has obviously temporally exited the game to "fix me" as he put it. About 20 seconds later my game crashes... Along with a big chunk of my firewall ! Obviously he somehow managed to do some sort of attack on me which caused my game to crash, something I though would be impossible since I only just downloaded a update for winXP that was supposed to stop people crashing applications using DirectX. Yet he still managed to grash my game...
Now this is where I hope you technically minded wizards can help me.
1) How did this person crash my game, &
2) How can I stop it from happening again.

Thx, all suggestions & ideas welcome, Dave.

[Spud1]

need more info first -)

were you playing through steam? or the 'proper' tfc
if you used steam then did steam crash also?

what firewall have you got? and what connection? which ISP?

what do your firewall logs say about the time it happened?

[Dave_07]

Yes was playing via proper tfc using the server browser u get with tfc.
No steam was involved.
Firewall: ZoneAlarmfree.
Connection: 56k, dynamic ip.
Misc: All uptodate with winxp security updates, Anti-virus & ZA updates.
Full system-wide AVG Scan showed no infections
The ZA logs for the time it happend, as well as all logged events befor
that seem to be missing. Either that or the logs don't go back that far.

Dave.

[r1zeek]

Not much of an expert but he could of used some kind of Nuker, iirc they can knock out a dial up connection, so it would stop the game.
What version of TFC are you running and have you got ZA up to date?

[Dave_07]

TFC Version is upto date (Ver 1.1.1.0)
ZoneAlarm is also uptodate.
Nuker, iirc ... ????

[streetster]

nuker - something which sends loads of packets to your comp (basically a DoS attack), iirc - if i remember correctly.. but you knew that ...

[Spud1]

ok well the 'proper' tfc is a better game BUT its far too easy for some1 to get your ip with it, steam makes it harder with using diff commands to get at that info and having the option of having it masked by the server etc etc

but it sounds like you have been nuked, 56k ppl on windows are dead easy to packet flood, the connection just cant cope and windows just says bleh and rolls over. firewalls wouldnt stop em in this case as tfc keeps the port open

[r1zeek]

Something with packet filtering would stop it though wouldn't it. I know some routers have it (i think) and my wireless airstations have it.

[Steve]

Sounds like the networking layer in the game was exploited in some way.

Some people need to get a life, or a whack across the head...

[r1zeek]

Some people need to get a life, or a whack across the head...

You speak the truth my friend, stupid "H4x0r5"

[mike_w]

Some people need to get a life

Says the person who just started a thread about sandwiches and crust allocation?

But seriously, I agree with Kez, people who do that sort of thing are just plain stupid and immature.

[Steve]

Says the person who just started a thread about sandwiches and crust allocation?

I VERY nearly actually suggested that these saddo's went and cut sandwiches instead of spoiling TFC, lol.

What's the best way of attempting to prevent such attacks then? My firewall does SPI so I should be able to set up a filter - I don't play TFC any more though, so it doesn't really affect me.

[Moby-Dick]

playing at a LAN where is someone crashes your game, you go over and give them a kicking ?

SPI would be a good start, but ideally you'd want something like the fully proxied service a watchguard does for HTTP , where it checks each packet of data for anything dodgy. However HL proxying would probably get confused with an aimbot ?

[Dave_07]

What is SPI ?
How is it possible to get players ip's via TFC ?

Dave.

[Moby-Dick]

SPI is a firewall methodology - statefull packet inspection

[loki]

I feel sorry for you. The worst thing about this though is that it is probably some little 13 year old loser using one of the tools to cause a dns attack. He probably doesnt have a clue about how it works.