Duel of Sword, a mobile PVP sword-fighting game available on the Taptap platform had its game servers taken down on August 10 by a DDOS attack launched by the Taiwanese hacking group ACCN.

Yesterday on Zhihu, Huang Yimeng, CEO of Taptap, issued a statement detailing the company’s efforts to fight back against these frequent DDOS attacks, which are aimed at small- and medium-sized developers. In the statement, Huang noted that in June of this year, Taptap formed an alliance of video game studios with the aim of stopping extortionist hacker attacks, and that the alliance has been working with authorities to collect evidence and trace the hackers. In the face of these efforts, Huang stated that ACCN hackers would be “committing suicide” if they didn’t stop their attacks.

Huang went on to say that in addition to this, Taptap will also be redoubling the DDOS protection it offers to developers on their platform, providing smaller developers with more robust and long-lasting protection.

Huang devoted the last part of his statement to highlighting the ease and low cost of performing such attacks. He posted screenshots of search results on Taobao for DDOS services advertised for as low as five yuan.

In an update to Huang’s statement on August 11, he reported that friends of his at Alibaba, the company that owns Taobao, reached out to him and promised to begin tackling the problem of DDOS services being sold on the platform.