Image: Valve Software
Game four of the grand finals was paused for almost two hours, and was even remade before the organisers decided to postpone it.
The grand finals of Dota 2 DreamLeague Season 25 between 
Team Spirit and 
Tundra Esports has been postponed to Tuesday (4 March), after multiple Spirit team members were hit by an alleged DDoS attack that prevented them from playing in the match.
The DDoS attack occurred during game four of the grand finals, with Spirit already up 2-1 in the series and seemingly on the verge of winning the whole tournament. However, a technical pause occured at the 18-minute mark, after Spirit players 
Denis “Larl” Sigitov and Magomed “Collapse” Khalilov were disconnected from the game. This persisted for almost two hours as both continually failed to reconnect.
A full remake of game four was also attempted, only for Spirit captain Yaroslav “Miposhka” Naidenov to encounter the same problems.
During the extended pause, Spirit released a statement on their official X (formerly Twitter) account where they claimed that they “encountered a DDoS attack on the Steam accounts of Collapse and Larl." The organisation also said that this attack was made possible “due to a vulnerability inside Steam/Dota 2."
Collapse also sent out a statement on his official Telegram channel regarding the situation, claiming that the DDoS attacks came in the form of someone “spamming party invites, chats, etc. 100 times per second, and Dota was simply crashing due to the number of requests."
DDoS attacks, or Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks, is a form of cyberattack wherein the perpetrator floods a server with internet traffic in order to prevent a machine or network resource from becoming accessible for its users. DDoS attacks are nothing new to the Dota 2 esports scene, having been a problem even during the early days of the competitive scene, as malicious actors used them to alter the results of matches, among other reasons.
With all attempts to continue playing the grand finals failing, DreamLeague Season 25 organiser ESL announced that game four of the match has been postponed to Tuesday. ESL did not state if the series will continue in the initial state of game four prior to the pause, or with another remake of the game.
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