Improved IP Bans

Our new and improved title-level IP Bans system provides a more intuitive interface to help reduce risk when managing IP Bans and preventing DDoS attacks.

The Basics – IP Bans

How do you keep your game and services running smoothly, free from DDoS attacks and bad actors ruining the experience? The answer an IP banning service like the one available to all Playfab Foundation Mode customers.

Without a service like PlayFab, titles have to build their own layer to identify IP addresses of bad actors and prevent their accounts being able to login and authenticate to the game service. Titles have to build their own system to track, manage, and audit those IP addresses (in the case of false positives) for these common benefits:

• Stopping high-volume, automated abuse (DDoS sources, scraping, credential-stuffing) before it reaches game servers.
• Buying time - slowing a determined bad actor while a durable, identity-level ban is prepared.
• Cutting cost - dropping traffic at the network edge is far cheaper than handling it in the game service.

The Challenge – Managing IP Bans at Scale

However, banning the wrong IP address on a massive list can be costly to discover and unwind. For example, false positives can include thousands or millions of users playing games via cloud streaming who share data center IP addresses. Carrier-grade NAT addresses can also be shared by thousands of players. Banning one of these addresses from your title can unknowingly disrupt play for your entire community.

Currently, account-level bans support this by optionally allowing you to specify an IP address. This system needs better visibility and management tools for IP addresses compared to the amount of risk introduced. Further, this system lacks tools for using IP bans defensively, to combat DDoS attacks.

The Solution– PlayFab Improved IP Banning System
We have solved these problems by providing a specialized system and easier interface for managing IP bans. It also adds previously unsupported functionality for banning ranges of IP addresses, allowing you to prevent DDoS attacks from entire regions.

This system is fully decoupled from the existing account ban system, meaning your existing applied bans are completely unaffected.

• IP Bans Management UX: new Game Manager experience for managing these IP bans.
• IP Bans Admin API: Admin API surface for full management of IP bans.
• IP Range Bans: added support for banning ranges of IP addresses with CIDR blocks.
• (Coming Soon) Migrating existing IP bans: we will soon be migrating existing account bans with IP addresses specified to new IP bans in this system.

Get started today!

Select your title in PlayFab Game Manager, then navigate to Identity > IP Bans. We also encourage you to review our documentation to better familiarize yourself with the system.