What's the proper reaction to getting beaten in a game of Halo 3? Practice more? Play against some more novice opponents? Unfortunately, not everyone is as good a sport as we are, and apparently Xbox Live is being increasingly targeted by hacker tools that attack a player's internet connection, forcing him or her out of the game.

The disruptions are being caused by a type of denial-of-service attack. These hacks are normally leveraged against larger foes, like commercial web servers, using the internet connections of dozens, if not hundreds of machines, all trying to connect to the server at once. By overloading it with requests, the attacker effectively denies other users the use of its services.

On XBL, players looking to disrupt another's service just have to sniff out the target's IP address. Though XBL doesn't show the IPs of other players, it can be possible to determine by analyzing network logs, especially if the target is the one hosting a game. Armed with that piece of information, an attacker uses a PC tool to coordinate the attack. In order to create enough traffic to disrupt the victim's connection, the tool lets the attacker rent time on a botnet, an illegal underground network of computers that have been compromised by malware, putting them under the control of a hacker. By paying to access a large group of these machines, the attacker has enough bandwidth under his control to quickly knock his target off of XBL.

The sad thing isn't just that there are people taking their games so seriously that they risk jail time just to get revenge on other players, but that there's little to be done about the situation. Tools to mitigate the effect of DoS attacks are expensive and not well suited for use by the average user at home. Microsoft could shield players from each others' IPs by routing all traffic through it's own servers, but there's no indication it's willing to take that very expensive step.

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