France declares war on Rust

Garry Newman’s Rust is probably the most hardcore of the current crop of survival games. When you log in to the persistent servers, your character starts bare-naked with nothing more than a rock for protection in a hostile environment. Craftable items can be stolen. Buildings you make can be destroyed by anyone. When you log off, your in-game character lies down and goes to sleep – easy pickings for other players. Players that survive long enough, can eventually craft powerfully unbalanced weapons, such as the submachine gun in the above image. Despite these unfriendly mechanics (fans say it’s all part of the fun) Newman revealed on Reddit that Rust has made $5.5 million in the three weeks it’s been available on Steam’s Early Access program.

Unfortunately, the popularity of Rust combined with its griefer’s paradise gameplay attracts a certain amount of attention from self-styled internet activists. Over the Christmas and New Year’s holiday, Rust experienced distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks from hackers, allegedly based in France, that wanted to call attention to issues in the game they felt were being ignored. Newman responded by updating the server and client software to close the holes the hackers were exploiting and by appealing to the community to help track down the troublemakers.

If the attackers want to contact us on the above address to work with us to fix exploits then feel free…but please don’t expect anything in return. Attacking us is not the way to get what you want. In fact, it’s a pretty good way to guarantee that the opposite will happen.

Although intermittent server issues persist, users report that the DDOS attacks have lost much of their effectiveness. Connectivity failures appear to be mostly due to the high volume of players trying to play the game at the same time.