Microsoft boosting Xbox Party Chat security ahead of Series X/S launch

Microsoft is making changes to the security for its Xbox Party Chat.

That's according to engineer Bill Ridmann, who replied to a thread on Reddit – as spotted by Pure Xbox – from a poster warning that players can be vulnerable to distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks from other users via the peer-to-peer system employed on Xbox Live. This means that bad actors can bombard people's internet address with data and take them offline.

Ridmann posted that Microsoft is in the process of completely moving Xbox's party system to a server-based platform, which will make it much more secure.

"We know this is a problem - we are actually phasing out P2P voice connections for party chat completely which we've been working on quite a bit in the background to stop this very problem. We've been ramping up a larger percentage of parties to be completely server-based week over week (so you don't make direct connections to other party members so they can not see your IP) and soon should have no more P2P based parties.

"I've seen some concerns here as well related to parties and the mobile app - it's always been the case if you've used the mobile app to join a party the party becomes server-based and your phone's IP is never exposed to others."

It sounds like this is a slow and gradual process behind the scenes at Microsoft that is on-going as the company prepares to launch its brand new Xbox Series X and S consoles. As of April of this year, Microsoft's Xbox Live service boasts in the region of 90m monthly active users.

Both of those machines are being released in just a week on November 10.

You can find out everything you need to know about the Xbox Series X here.