Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind: Starcraft 2 - 0day Download Experience

The wonderful Starcraft 2 Wings of Liberty has been released earlier this week, and as a hardcore fan of the original game, wanted to get it just as it roll out, which meant the environmental way of downloading a digital copy.

If you happen to know Blizzard ( the magnificent ! ), their distribution tool is based on 2 channels, one which is the direct downloader over HTTP, and the other which is P2P based. which is the main issue when a new game rolls out, since there werent enough ppl that could share parts, and thus rendered the download for me ( in Israel ) to 90Kbps total, which is about 900Kbps under my acceptable ratio.

So i decided to go for the following – first i will download over a VM in the normal way ( so i could share like a normal user ), but i wanted to play right away (why else would i buy at day 0 ? :) so i had a second download running in the same time on my main computer, which i wanted to “tweak”.

The direction for me was to disable the P2P vector on my main computer, so i could download only from the HTTP source, which then climbs the the limits, and so i did.

When looking into the Log in the downloader i found the tracker ( the distributor of the list that is used to connect beteen the P2P users ) and found it to be http://eu.tracker.worldofwarcraft.com

then i ran a DNS Lookup on the FQDN of : eu.tracker.worldofwarcraft.com and got back a single resolution to - 80.239.178.125

In the following step, i configured a Firewall Rule to block any traffic from my computer to that IP Address, in order to prevent the sharing distribution.

The result was easy , the few seconds after the rule as been configured, the P2P connections dropped, and the entire download reverted to HTTP, which then made the download climb to 500KBPS, and eventually to 1.1MBPS