A Minecraft server running a popular survival map goes dark mid-raid. A FiveM roleplay city drops every player at once during a Friday night event. A Rust base gets wiped not by raiders but by a flood of junk packets that never reached the game loop. None of this is rare anymore. Multiplayer game servers sit near the top of the DDoS target list in 2026, and the attacks hitting Minecraft, FiveM, ARK: Survival Ascended, Rust and Valve Source Engine servers keep getting easier to launch and harder to shrug off with a default firewall rule.
This tutorial walks through building a layered defense for a self-hosted game server: a reverse proxy that hides your real IP address, a hardened Linux firewall, RCON and admin-panel lockdowns, fail2ban brute-force protection, game-specific tuning for four of the most-targeted titles, monitoring, and a load test you can run before an attacker does it for you. Every step uses tools and services that are actually shipping today, and every claim about attack traffic composition is sourced, not guessed.
None of this requires an enterprise security budget. A small Minecraft community running on a $15-a-month VPS can apply the same reverse-proxy-plus-firewall pattern that a 200-player FiveM roleplay city uses, and the setup time for the core protection (Steps 1 through 4) runs under two hours for someone comfortable with SSH. What costs the most, in practice, isn’t money; it’s the downtime and churn that follow an outage nobody saw coming. A server that goes dark during a scheduled event loses players who don’t come back, and a community that’s been hit twice without visible remediation tends to lose its most active members to a competitor server that stayed up.
Why Game Servers Are 2026’s Favorite DDoS Target
Game servers make an unusually soft target. They run on predictable ports, they’re often hosted on consumer-grade VPS plans without upstream scrubbing, and their owners are frequently community admins rather than security teams. Attackers know this, and the traffic data backs it up. According to an analysis of game-server attack patterns during the early-2026 Winter Games period, UDP flooding accounted for 85% of observed attack traffic, with DNS amplification responsible for 19% and memcached amplification for 11.8% of the remainder (the overlap reflects blended multi-vector attacks rather than a strict 100% split).
Minecraft servers face RCON brute force, vulnerable plugins and automated griefing bots on top of straight volumetric floods. FiveM servers deal with DDoS, resource exploits, txAdmin brute force and injection attacks against custom Lua resources. ARK: Survival Ascended and Rust servers are routinely targeted during raid windows, with RCON exploits and administrative-panel attacks layered on top of the network flood. And the attacker tooling keeps evolving: a 2026 campaign documented by Hackread abused misconfigured Jenkins servers, exploiting the scriptText endpoint to run arbitrary Groovy code and deploy a DDoS botnet with attack modes purpose-built for Valve Source Engine servers, targeting ports 27015, 53 and 123.
The common thread across all of this: a single local firewall, no matter how well configured, cannot absorb volumetric traffic once it has already saturated your network link. You need edge filtering in front of the origin, not just rules behind it. That’s the architecture this tutorial builds.
It’s also worth separating the two failure modes that get lumped together under “my server got attacked.” The first is a volumetric flood: raw packet volume designed to saturate your network link before a single game packet gets processed. The second is an application-layer or credential attack: RCON brute force, txAdmin login attempts, or an exploit against a specific plugin or resource. They need different defenses. A reverse proxy or hosting-level scrubber solves the first problem. A hardened firewall, fail2ban and disciplined admin-panel access solve the second. Most guides online only cover one or the other; this one covers both, because a server that’s hardened against floods but still has RCON open to the internet is still one brute-forced password away from a full takeover.
| Attack Class | Share / Status | Primary Targets |
|---|---|---|
| UDP flooding | 85% of observed attack traffic (early-2026 Winter Games period) | All UDP-based game protocols |
| DNS amplification | 19% of observed attack traffic | Servers with exposed or poorly rate-limited DNS resolvers |
| Memcached amplification | 11.8% of observed attack traffic | Hosts running exposed memcached instances |
| RCON brute force | Named recurring attack class | Minecraft |
| txAdmin brute force / injection | Named recurring attack class | FiveM |
| RCON exploits and admin-panel attacks during raid windows | Named recurring attack class | Rust, ARK: Survival Ascended |
Prerequisites: Tools, Versions and Accounts You Need
Before starting, gather the following. Version numbers matter here because older releases of these tools have known gaps in default configuration.
- A Linux VPS or dedicated host running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or Debian 12 (the commands below assume a systemd-based distro with
nftablesavailable) - Root or sudo access via SSH, with key-based authentication already configured
nftables1.0.9 or newer (bundled with Ubuntu 24.04; check withnft --version)fail2ban1.1.0 or neweriperf33.16 or newer for load testing- A free or paid TCPShield account if you’re protecting a Minecraft server (TCPShield is a reverse-proxy and origin-IP-concealment service aimed at small-to-medium Minecraft communities)
- Your game server software: Paper or Spigot 1.21.x for Minecraft, a current FiveM server build with txAdmin for FiveM, or the latest Rust/ARK: Survival Ascended dedicated server build
- Access to your domain’s DNS settings (needed to point your game domain at the proxy instead of your origin IP)
- A webhook URL (Discord, Slack, or a generic endpoint) for alerting, if you want the monitoring step to notify you automatically
If you’re running Jenkins or any other CI/automation tool alongside your game infrastructure (common for FiveM resource deployment pipelines), confirm it’s patched to the latest LTS release before continuing. Step 9 covers why that matters.
Step 1: Audit Your Current Attack Surface
Start by listing every port your server actually needs open to the public internet. Most game-server owners over-expose without realizing it: the game port, sure, but also RCON, query ports, web-based admin panels (txAdmin runs its UI on a separate port by default), SSH, and sometimes a monitoring dashboard nobody remembers enabling.
sudo ss -tulnp
sudo nft list ruleset
sudo nmap -sS -sU -p- --open localhostRun the nmap scan from an external host too, not just localhost, so you see what the internet actually sees. Cross-reference the open ports against your game’s documentation. If RCON (typically port 25575 for Minecraft, or a custom port for Rust/ARK) shows up in an external scan, that’s your first fix target. If a txAdmin or web-admin port is reachable from anywhere, that’s your second. Write this list down; you’ll use it in Step 4 when you build the firewall ruleset.
Step 2: Pick a Mitigation Architecture
There are three broad approaches, and most serious setups end up combining at least two of them. A reverse-proxy or edge-filtering service sits in front of your origin and conceals its real IP address, which is the single most effective thing you can do because an attacker who never learns your origin IP can’t flood it directly. A hosting-level anti-DDoS service bakes filtering into the network path your provider already controls. And local firewall hardening (nftables, fail2ban) stops the smaller stuff: brute force, port scans, and opportunistic probing, but not a volumetric flood that’s already saturated your pipe.
| Approach | Hides Origin IP | Stops Volumetric Floods | Best Fit | Setup Effort |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TCPShield (reverse proxy) | Yes | Yes (edge-absorbed) | Minecraft communities, small-to-medium scale | Low — DNS change plus proxy config |
| OVHcloud Anti-DDoS Game | Partial (hosting-level) | Yes | Rust, ARK and other non-Minecraft titles on OVH-hosted VPS | Low — integrated into hosting plan |
| Cloudflare Spectrum | Yes | Yes (TCP/UDP proxying) | Custom TCP/UDP game protocols needing a generic proxy | Medium — requires Cloudflare account and app config |
| Local nftables + fail2ban only | No | No | Baseline hygiene on any setup, always layered under the above | Low — but insufficient alone |
For this tutorial, the main path uses TCPShield as the reverse proxy (because it’s purpose-built for Minecraft and has the clearest setup path), with nftables and fail2ban underneath for the layers a proxy doesn’t cover, and a note on where OVHcloud Anti-DDoS Game or Cloudflare Spectrum fit if you’re running Rust, ARK or a custom protocol instead.
Step 3: Set Up TCPShield as a Reverse Proxy
Create a TCPShield account and add your server’s domain. TCPShield issues you a set of proxy IP addresses; you point your game’s DNS A record (or SRV record, for Minecraft’s _minecraft._tcp convention) at those addresses instead of your origin server’s IP. Players connect to the proxy, the proxy forwards traffic to your real server, and your origin IP never appears in a client’s connection log.
On the origin side, enable PROXY protocol support so your game server still sees the real player IP (useful for bans and logging) instead of the proxy’s IP for every connection. For a Paper-based Minecraft server, this means setting proxy-protocol: true in config/paper-global.yml:
# config/paper-global.yml
proxies:
proxy-protocol: true
velocity:
enabled: false
bungee-cord:
online-mode: trueRestart the server after editing this file. Then test a connection through the proxy domain (not your origin IP directly) and confirm in your server log that the connecting IP shown matches the real client, not a TCPShield proxy address. If it still shows a proxy IP, double-check that PROXY protocol is enabled on both sides and that you haven’t left a firewall rule blocking the proxy’s forwarding range.
Step 4: Harden the Origin Firewall With nftables
Once your proxy is live, the single most important firewall change you can make is to stop accepting game-port traffic from anywhere except your proxy’s IP ranges. This is the step that actually makes the reverse proxy useful: if your origin still answers direct connections, an attacker who finds your real IP (through a stale DNS record, a leaked server list, or a misconfigured plugin) can bypass the proxy entirely.
#!/usr/sbin/nft -f
flush ruleset
table inet filter {
set tcpshield_ips {
type ipv4_addr
flags interval
elements = { 193.0.0.0/24, 198.0.0.0/24 } # replace with your TCPShield-issued ranges
}
chain input {
type filter hook input priority 0; policy drop;
ct state established,related accept
iif lo accept
ip protocol icmp accept
tcp dport 22 ip saddr { YOUR.ADMIN.IP.HERE } accept
tcp dport 25565 ip saddr @tcpshield_ips accept
udp dport 25565 ip saddr @tcpshield_ips accept
tcp dport 25575 ip saddr { YOUR.ADMIN.IP.HERE } accept
}
chain forward { type filter hook forward priority 0; policy drop; }
chain output { type filter hook output priority 0; policy accept; }
}Load it with sudo nft -f /etc/nftables.conf and enable it at boot with sudo systemctl enable --now nftables. Notice RCON (port 25575 here) is locked to your admin IP only, never to the proxy range. A reverse proxy forwards game traffic; it has no business touching your RCON console, and leaving that port open to a wider range is one of the most common misconfigurations in this entire setup.
Step 5: Lock Down RCON and Admin Panels
RCON brute force is one of the attack classes named specifically for Minecraft, and the equivalent web-based admin panel (txAdmin for FiveM) carries the same risk for that ecosystem. Beyond the firewall rule from Step 4, set a long randomly generated RCON password (20+ characters, not a dictionary word with numbers appended), and disable RCON entirely if you don’t actively use it:
# server.properties
enable-rcon=true
rcon.port=25575
rcon.password=CHANGE_THIS_TO_A_LONG_RANDOM_STRING
broadcast-rcon-to-ops=falseFor FiveM, txAdmin’s web UI should sit behind the same IP allowlist you applied to RCON, and two-factor authentication should be turned on for every admin account, not just the owner’s. FiveM servers currently face txAdmin brute force as a named attack vector alongside DDoS, resource exploits and injection attacks, so this panel deserves the same treatment as a root SSH login, not a convenience afterthought.
Step 6: Deploy fail2ban Against Brute Force
fail2ban watches log files for repeated failure patterns and temporarily bans the source IP at the firewall level. It won’t stop a volumetric flood, but it closes the brute-force gap that a proxy and a static firewall rule don’t cover on their own, particularly for SSH and any service that logs failed authentication attempts.
# /etc/fail2ban/jail.local
[sshd]
enabled = true
port = 22
maxretry = 4
findtime = 600
bantime = 86400
[minecraft-rcon]
enabled = true
port = 25575
filter = minecraft-rcon
logpath = /opt/minecraft/logs/latest.log
maxretry = 3
findtime = 300
bantime = 172800
action = nftables-multiport[name=minecraft-rcon, port="25575", protocol=tcp]You’ll need a matching filter file at /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/minecraft-rcon.conf with a regex that matches your server’s failed-RCON-auth log line format (this varies by server software, so check your logs for the exact wording after a deliberately wrong password attempt, then write the regex against that). Restart fail2ban with sudo systemctl restart fail2ban and confirm the jail is active with sudo fail2ban-client status minecraft-rcon.
Step 7: Tune Game-Specific Network Settings
Each game has its own soft spots. Here’s what to change for the four titles named most often in current attack data.
Minecraft (Paper/Spigot)
Disable the legacy query protocol unless you specifically need server-list ping tools that depend on it, since query responses can be abused as a reflection vector: set enable-query=false in server.properties. Keep plugins updated, since vulnerable plugins are named as a specific Minecraft attack class alongside RCON brute force and griefing bots; an outdated permissions or economy plugin is a more common entry point than people expect.
FiveM and txAdmin
Audit every custom Lua resource for unsanitized input before it ships to production, since FiveM servers face injection attacks as a named risk alongside DDoS and resource exploits. Keep txAdmin itself on the latest build, since it’s the component that brute-force attempts target directly.
Rust and ARK: Survival Ascended
Both titles see concentrated attacks during raid windows, with RCON exploits and administrative-panel attacks layered on top of straight floods. If you’re hosted on OVHcloud, their Anti-DDoS Game service is built specifically to filter this traffic at the hosting layer for Rust and ARK, which is worth evaluating instead of (or alongside) a reverse proxy, since these titles use custom protocols that don’t always proxy as cleanly as Minecraft’s.
Step 8: Add Application-Layer Rate Limiting
Rate limiting at the connection level catches the traffic a proxy’s volumetric filtering misses: a smaller number of connections hammering your server with expensive requests rather than raw packet volume. nftables can do basic rate limiting directly:
table inet filter {
chain input {
tcp dport 25565 ip saddr @tcpshield_ips limit rate 50/second burst 20 packets accept
tcp dport 25565 ip saddr @tcpshield_ips drop
}
}This caps new connection attempts even from your trusted proxy range, which matters because a compromised or abused proxy session is still a session you want bounded. Tune the rate to your server’s real player count; a 20-slot Minecraft server and a 200-slot FiveM city need very different ceilings here, so start conservative and loosen the limit only if you see legitimate players getting throttled during normal peak hours.
Step 9: Evaluate Hosting-Level Anti-DDoS Options
If a reverse proxy doesn’t fit your game’s protocol, or you want a second layer of filtering even with TCPShield in place, hosting-level anti-DDoS is worth the evaluation. OVHcloud Anti-DDoS Game filters traffic to servers like Rust and ARK at the network edge before it reaches your VPS, and because it’s integrated into the hosting environment rather than a separate reverse-proxy hop, it adds no extra DNS indirection for players to configure.
For titles with fully custom TCP or UDP protocols that neither TCPShield nor a game-specific hosting filter supports well, Cloudflare Spectrum offers a generic TCP/UDP proxy that can absorb volumetric floods the same way it does for HTTP traffic, at the cost of a more involved setup since you’re configuring a raw port-forwarding application rather than a purpose-built game proxy.
Step 10: Harden CI and Admin Tooling After the Jenkins Botnet Campaign
If you run Jenkins, or any similar automation server, alongside your game infrastructure for deployment pipelines, this step is not optional. The 2026 campaign documented by Hackread specifically abused misconfigured Jenkins instances through the scriptText endpoint to run arbitrary Groovy code, then used the compromised hosts to run a DDoS botnet with attack modes built for Valve Source Engine servers. The entry point wasn’t the game server at all; it was an admin tool sitting next to it with script execution left wide open.
# Jenkins: Manage Jenkins > Security
# Disable the script console for non-admins and enforce script approval
System.getProperty("hudson.model.ParametersAction.keepUndefinedParameters")
# From the Script Console (admin-only), confirm sandboxing is enforced:
Jenkins.instance.getExtensionList('jenkins.security.s2m.AdminWhitelistRule')[0].setMasterKillSwitch(true)More practically: restrict the Jenkins script console to admin accounts only, enforce script approval for any pipeline step that runs Groovy, and put Jenkins itself behind the same IP allowlist you used for RCON and txAdmin. It’s also worth tracking adjacent tooling CVEs even when they don’t name game-server software directly. Recent disclosures including CVE-2026-26331 (a remote-code-execution issue in yt-dlp) and CVE-2026-25545 (a server-side request forgery issue in Astro) illustrate how a third-party tool bundled into a deployment pipeline can become the weak link, even when nothing in your game stack itself is vulnerable. Patch these on their own schedule, not just when a game-specific advisory tells you to.
Step 11: Set Up Monitoring and Alerting
You want to know about an attack while it’s happening, not after a player posts a screenshot of the server status page. A simple connection-count watcher that fires a webhook when traffic spikes beyond your normal baseline covers most of what you need without standing up a full observability stack.
#!/bin/bash
# /opt/monitor/conn-watch.sh
THRESHOLD=300
WEBHOOK_URL="https://your-webhook-endpoint.example/alert"
while true; do
CONNS=$(ss -tun state established '( dport = :25565 or sport = :25565 )' | wc -l)
if [ "$CONNS" -gt "$THRESHOLD" ]; then
curl -s -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json"
-d "{"content":"Connection spike detected: ${CONNS} active connections on port 25565"}"
"$WEBHOOK_URL"
sleep 300
fi
sleep 30
doneRun it as a systemd service so it survives reboots. Set the threshold based on a week of normal peak-hour observation, not a guess, since real player spikes during events can look similar to the early stage of an attack and you don’t want to desensitize yourself with false alarms in the first 48 hours.
Step 12: Load-Test Your Defenses With iperf3
Current operational guidance recommends testing whether your proxy and firewall combination can absorb a realistic UDP burst without dropping legitimate player traffic, rather than assuming it works because the configuration looks right on paper. iperf3 is the standard tool for this.
# On a separate test host (never test from inside your own network segment
# in a way that could be mistaken for an actual attack):
iperf3 -c your-test-target.example -u -b 500M -t 30 -p 25565
# On the server being tested, run the listener first:
iperf3 -s -p 5201Watch your monitoring dashboard during the test. A well-configured reverse proxy should absorb the burst at the edge, and your origin’s connection count and CPU load should barely move. If the origin spikes instead, that’s a sign traffic is reaching it directly, meaning either the firewall rule from Step 4 has a gap or your DNS record still points somewhere it shouldn’t. Only run this test against infrastructure you own or have explicit written permission to test; running an unsolicited load test against someone else’s server is the same as launching the attack you’re trying to defend against.
Step 13: Write an Incident Response Runbook
Document what you’ll actually do when the alert fires, before you need it, because decision-making under an active attack is worse than decision-making on a quiet afternoon. A minimal runbook covers: who gets paged, what the first three commands are (checking ss, checking nft counters, checking the proxy dashboard), when to escalate to your hosting provider’s abuse/DDoS team, and how to communicate downtime to your player base without revealing operational details an attacker could use. Store it somewhere accessible even if your primary admin panel is the thing that’s down, not only inside the tool that might be unreachable.
DDoS Isn’t the Only Threat Facing Game Platforms
Everything above hardens the network and the console that controls your server. It’s worth a brief detour into the account side of the equation too, since the same community that gets DDoSed is often the same community whose player accounts get targeted for takeover and in-game economy fraud. These are different attack classes than the ones this tutorial’s firewall rules solve, but they tend to show up on the same servers, often run by the same overworked volunteer admin team.
Gaming accounts are an attractive target for cybercriminals precisely because they often hold stored payment methods, tradeable virtual currency, and cosmetic inventories that resell on secondary markets, while carrying weaker fraud monitoring than a bank account. LexisNexis Risk Solutions reported an 8% global rise in fraud attacks, with synthetic identities and agentic bots named as contributing factors, a pattern that maps directly onto the automated account-creation and credential-stuffing bots that hit login endpoints on gaming platforms and community server panels alike.
The practical takeaway for a server admin: the same IP allowlisting and rate limiting built into Steps 4 and 8 of this tutorial double as a weak defense against credential-stuffing bots hitting a login-gated server or web store, and the same monitoring habit from Step 11 should extend to watching for unusual account-creation spikes, not just connection-count spikes. If your community runs any kind of linked web store or donation portal, treat its login endpoint with the same IP-restriction mindset you applied to RCON and txAdmin, since it’s a softer target than the game server itself.
5 Common Pitfalls When Securing Game Servers
- Leaving the origin IP reachable after adding a proxy. The most frequent mistake in this entire process. A proxy only helps if the firewall actually blocks direct connections to the origin; otherwise an attacker who finds the old IP in a stale DNS cache bypasses your proxy completely.
- Treating RCON like a convenience feature instead of a root-level credential. RCON grants full administrative control over the game server. A short or reused password here is equivalent to a weak root SSH password.
- Relying on local firewall rules alone. nftables, iptables and fail2ban stop brute force and opportunistic scanning, but none of them can absorb a flood that has already saturated your network link upstream of the server.
- Forgetting the admin tooling next to the game server. The Jenkins campaign targeting Valve Source Engine servers didn’t exploit the game software at all; it exploited a misconfigured CI tool sitting on the same network.
- Skipping the load test. A firewall and proxy configuration that looks correct on paper can still have a gap that only shows up under real traffic volume, which is exactly what Step 12 is for.
Troubleshooting: 8 Issues and Fixes
| Symptom | Likely Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Players connect but server logs show the proxy’s IP, not the player’s | PROXY protocol not enabled on both ends | Verify proxy-protocol: true in paper-global.yml and the matching toggle in your TCPShield dashboard |
| Server unreachable after applying nftables rules | Admin IP set incorrectly, or SSH rule listed after a default-drop policy | Console into the host via your provider’s VNC/KVM and re-check rule ordering; test SSH access before closing the session |
| fail2ban jail shows 0 bans despite obvious brute-force attempts in logs | Regex in the custom filter file doesn’t match your server’s actual log format | Run fail2ban-regex against a sample log line to confirm the pattern matches before trusting the jail |
| Legitimate players getting disconnected during normal peak hours | Rate limit threshold set too low for real player count | Re-check the nftables rate-limit rule from Step 8 against a week of normal traffic, not a guess |
| iperf3 test shows origin CPU/connection spike despite proxy being active | Traffic reaching origin directly, bypassing the proxy | Confirm DNS actually resolves to the proxy IP from an external resolver, and re-check the firewall allowlist from Step 4 |
| txAdmin panel still reachable from unexpected IPs | Admin panel port not included in the firewall allowlist | Add the txAdmin port to the same IP-restricted rule used for RCON |
| Monitoring webhook never fires even during a confirmed attack | Threshold set too high, or the watch script isn’t running as a persistent service | Confirm the systemd service is active with systemctl status and lower the threshold based on observed baseline |
| Server list ping tools stop working after disabling query | Query protocol intentionally disabled in Step 7 | Expected behavior; if you need ping tools, re-enable query but keep it firewalled to trusted scanner IPs only |
Advanced Tips for High-Traffic Game Communities
Once the baseline setup is running, a few refinements pay off as your player count grows. Layer two providers instead of one: run TCPShield in front of a host that also sits on a provider offering hosting-level anti-DDoS, so a gap in one layer doesn’t leave you fully exposed. Rotate your origin IP periodically even with a proxy in place, since a leaked IP from months ago can resurface in an attacker’s target list long after you assumed it was forgotten.
Separate your admin tooling onto its own network segment or VPN rather than exposing it on the same public interface as the game port, even behind an IP allowlist; a second network boundary means a single misconfiguration doesn’t expose everything at once. And treat your deployment pipeline with the same scrutiny as the server it deploys to. The Jenkins-to-Valve-server attack path is a direct illustration of why the weakest link in a game server’s security is sometimes the tool nobody thinks of as part of the game server at all.
Document every change you make to the firewall ruleset in a version-controlled file rather than editing live rules by hand over SSH. It’s a small habit that pays off the one time you need to roll back a change at 2 a.m. during an active incident instead of trying to remember which line you edited three weeks ago. Keep a rotating log of banned IPs and attack timestamps too, since a pattern of repeat offenders from the same subnet or hosting provider is useful evidence if you ever need to escalate an abuse report to your own host or to the attacker’s hosting provider.
Finally, don’t treat this as a one-time project. Attacker tooling evolves, as the Jenkins-to-botnet campaign shows, and new attack modes targeting specific game engines surface regularly. Sources that track game-server-specific security news, such as Daily CyberSecurity’s game-server security coverage, are worth a periodic check, the same way you’d check for a plugin update. A defense that was solid in January can have a gap by October if the threat model shifted underneath it and nobody revisited the configuration.
Complete Working Project: The Hardened Stack
Bringing every step together, a finished deployment for a self-hosted Minecraft server looks like this on disk:
/opt/minecraft/
├── server.jar
├── server.properties # RCON locked down, query disabled (Steps 5, 7)
├── config/paper-global.yml # proxy-protocol: true (Step 3)
├── logs/latest.log
/opt/monitor/
└── conn-watch.sh # connection-spike alerting (Step 11)
/etc/nftables.conf # default-drop, proxy-only allowlist (Step 4)
/etc/fail2ban/
├── jail.local # sshd + minecraft-rcon jails (Step 6)
└── filter.d/minecraft-rcon.conf
/etc/systemd/system/
├── conn-watch.service # runs monitor script at boot
└── minecraft.service # runs the game server itself
DNS: play.yourserver.example -> TCPShield proxy IPs (Step 3)
Hosting: OVHcloud Anti-DDoS Game or equivalent, evaluated per Step 9
Runbook: /opt/docs/incident-response.md (Step 13), stored outside the admin panelEnable the two systemd services, confirm the firewall and fail2ban jails are active on boot, run the iperf3 test from Step 12 once everything is live, and your stack has a tested, layered defense rather than a single firewall rule standing between your community and the next UDP flood.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a free TCPShield plan enough to protect a small Minecraft server?
For a small community server, a free-tier reverse proxy combined with the firewall hardening in Step 4 covers the most common attack scenarios. Larger servers or those that have already been targeted repeatedly should evaluate a paid tier or a second layer of hosting-level protection, as described in Step 9.
Can nftables alone stop a DDoS attack?
No. Local firewall tools like nftables and iptables can block brute force, port scans and opportunistic probing, but they cannot absorb volumetric traffic that has already saturated your network connection upstream of the server. That traffic needs to be filtered at the edge, which is why Steps 3 and 9 focus on proxy and hosting-level solutions.
Why does RCON need its own firewall rule separate from the game port?
RCON grants full administrative control over the server, unlike the regular game port which only accepts normal player connections. RCON brute force is named specifically as a Minecraft attack class, and a reverse proxy has no legitimate reason to forward RCON traffic, so that port should only ever accept connections from your own admin IP.
Does this setup work for FiveM and Rust the same way it works for Minecraft?
The layered approach (firewall, RCON/admin-panel lockdown, fail2ban, monitoring) applies to all four titles covered here. The proxy layer differs: TCPShield is purpose-built for Minecraft, while Rust and ARK: Survival Ascended are often better served by hosting-level options like OVHcloud Anti-DDoS Game, and FiveM’s txAdmin panel needs the same IP-restriction treatment as RCON.
What does the Jenkins botnet campaign have to do with Minecraft or Rust servers?
The 2026 campaign documented by Hackread specifically targeted Valve Source Engine servers, not Minecraft or Rust directly, but the underlying lesson applies broadly: a misconfigured CI/automation tool sitting next to your game infrastructure can become the entry point for an attack, even when the game server software itself has no vulnerability. Any admin who runs Jenkins or similar tooling alongside a game deployment pipeline should treat Step 10 as mandatory, regardless of which game they host.
How often should I re-run the iperf3 load test?
Re-test after any change to your firewall rules, proxy configuration, or hosting provider, and periodically (every few months) even without changes, since proxy ranges and provider configurations do shift over time. Always test against infrastructure you own, from a separate host, and never as an unsolicited test against someone else’s server.
What’s the single highest-impact step if I only have an hour to spend?
Step 4: locking the firewall down so only your proxy’s IP range (or your own admin IP) can reach the game port and RCON. A proxy that’s live but not enforced at the firewall level provides a false sense of protection, since the origin is still directly reachable.
Do I still need fail2ban if I’m already behind a reverse proxy?
Yes. A reverse proxy filters volumetric floods at the edge, but brute-force login attempts against SSH, RCON or an admin panel are a different attack class that fail2ban handles at the application and authentication layer. The two tools solve different problems and work best layered together rather than as substitutes for each other.
