Ares Games considers extra website protection after suffering multi-day DDoS attack

Ares Games is considering bolstering its website protection after suffering its first ever DDoS attack, which it says left its site inaccessible for about 10 hours across three days of difficulties.

The Italy-based War of the Ring publisher said thousands of fake requests repeatedly saturated its server bandwidth and CPU earlier this week, temporarily preventing some customers from reaching its main website and e-commerce site, which is also used for preorders and crowdfunding pledge management.

Ares director of production Roberto di Meglio told BoardGameWire no customer data was compromised during the cyber attack, adding that he was inclined to believe the company was targeted randomly rather than specifically.

He said, “It’s difficult to assess the exact monetary loss in terms of missed orders. We can assume most of the potential customers affected by the issue will probably come back at a later moment, so the revenue should be delayed but not lost – especially if the customer was visiting for something specific, like a pre-order or pledge manager.”

Ares’ e-commerce infrastructure supports ordinary direct sales alongside preorders and crowdfunding activity. The publisher has continued to use crowdfunding extensively, with its 16th Kickstarter project, Mega Empires: The Far East, completing its campaign earlier this year.

The DDoS attack comes after Ares said last year that it was developing its direct sales business to help offset reduced profits through traditional distribution channels amid the US tariff volatility.

Di Meglio told BoardGameWire at the time that the company planned a combination of reduced inventories, increased prices and product selection alongside “developing our direct sales to make up for the loss of profit through the traditional distribution tiers”.

While Ares has experienced other hacking attempts previously, Di Meglio said this was the publisher’s first DDoS attack. Its server administrators introduced additional security rules in response, and Ares is now considering whether to add further protection such as a DNS proxy service like Cloudflare.

But he added, “The main concern is that every rule or system you implement to stop this type of ‘swarm’ attack potentially might stop or slow down a regular visitor, so you have to find the best compromise between keeping danger out and allowing customers in.”

The incident comes as DDoS attacks have become more numerous and larger across the internet. Web application security and performance giant Cloudflare recently said it detected a 519% increase in hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks across its network during the first half of 2026.