T1 manager claims LCK team has suffered from DDoS attacks for months

T1’s team manager, Becker, spoke at length about the ongoing problems with team practice and claimed the DDoS attacks have been going on for much longer than we previously thought.

T1 Faker recently spoke out about how difficult it’s been to practice as DDoS attacks ravage high MMR LCK solo queue and, for a time, actual LCK matches.

Seeing as T1 is the most popular team in the region, it should come as no surprise that these attacks targeted them. According to T1 general manager Becker (in an on-stream statement fan translated by an_pilot), the attacks are due to an in-client vulnerability, and the issue has been going on for months.

“We’ve faced DDoS attacks in recent months (since December?) and the players have been attacked on stream in recent times. We’ve acknowledged this matter, and it’s not only our team’s matter as it’s also affected the LCK. Our understanding is that our IP is being exposed due to the LoL client and that the attacks stemmed from there,” he said.

He explained that things only got worse as the months went on, with things really coming to a head in February and March. It got to the point where the players couldn’t even scrim, let alone practice in solo queue.

“Our scrims also could not be held normally. Even though we have tried several technical solutions, we came to the point where our scrims couldn’t continue,” he lamented. “We received super accounts, and the players are using those super accounts. However, the MMR is not matching up, and the quality of solo queue isn’t as good as for their main accounts.”

Becker would later confirm that Faker and other T1 players to stop using their main accounts was a decision made within the team and playing on them wasn’t worth the risk. And, while the team is in the full swing of practicing now, they’ve had less time than other teams to scrim on these patches and have worse solo queue quality.

With T1’s next match being do-or-die, the team has a big challenge ahead of them if they want to make it to MSI 2024.