Why Was Battleground Mobile India Sending Signal to China Servers?

PUBG India was reportedly pinging servers from China.

PUBG ‘Battleground Mobile India’ official launch date has not been announced yet.

(Photo: battlegroundsmobileindia.com)

PUBG Mobile India aka Battlegrounds India has landed into a fresh controversy, after a user sniffed the data packets from the app and discovered that the app was reportedly sending signals to China servers located in Beijing on Monday, 21 June.

A report by IGN, a gaming news platform, claimed that the data sent and received by the Battlegrounds Mobile India APK are from China Mobile Communication servers in Beijing, the Tencent-run Proxima Beta in Hong Kong, as well as Microsoft Azure servers located in the US, Mumbai, and Moscow.

The report also claims that the app is sending signals to anti-cheat and cloud computing services run by Tencent, though it is not clear if these were also located in China.

PUBG mobile was banned by the Indian government in September last year, citing that the game was a threat to the “sovereignty, integrity, defence and security of the country.”

How Valid is the Claim?

Here's what the report by IGN claimed:

• Connection with a server located in China 36.152.4.34
• Connection with http://astat.bugly.qcloud.com
• Connection with http://down.anticheatexpert.com
• Connection with cloud.gsdk.proximabeta.com

The Quint tried to verify the claims, and here's what we found:

Connection with anticheatexpert and Qcloud established.

No connection established with China Mobile Servers.

Total four IPs located, two from India and two from Singapore.

1. There was no packet exchange with 36.152.4.34 (a server in China) and on doing a reverse IP lookup all the IPs which were captured by the packet sniffer pointed to servers located in India.
2. The packet sniffer did capture the connection request with http://astat.bugly.qcloud.com. Qcloud is owned by Tencent and BGMI was supposed to cut off all connections with Tencent. However, when we did a whois search for the IP, it showed us that the server is located in Singapore.
3. The packet sniffer did capture the connection request with http://down.anticheatexpert.com. This is to keep a check that no one is using hacks/cheats while playing the game.
4. We could not connect to http://cloud.gsdk.proximabeta.com, a server located in China.

However, this does not prove that the claims made by IGN are invalid. As several media reports suggest that Krafton developers fixed pinging China servers, late night on Monday.

Reason for Connecting With China Servers

Cyber security expert Sourajeet Majumder told The Quint that it is possible that IGN obtained the Chinese server IPs because the app is still in beta mode and allows the user to transfer their data from a server located in China to India.

But, what's suspicious is BGMI exchanging packets with Qcloud which is owned by Tencent. “I strongly feel since they are transferring the data, probably that is the reason they are still exchanging packets with Qcloud," he said.

It should be noted that the working and storing of data of games like BGMI are so complex it is difficult to deduce anything yet until the company lends clarity on this.

Will PUBG be Banned?

Meenakashi Lekhi, the chairperson of the Joint Committee on the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019, took note of the issue on Twitter, and said that she would reach out to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology – which announced the PUBG Mobile ban last September – to look into the issue.

The game developers made several changes to the new PUBG game, to prevent the application from getting banned again. The changes include renaming PUBG Mobile to 'Battlegrounds Mobile India' and hosting all the users data in India via Microsoft Azure. So why, after all this, would the game developers ping a server in China is not clear.

Krafton Responds

The Quint reached out to Krafton for a comment. The company in a statement confirmed that it is fully aware of the recent concerns over data handling in regards to Battlegrounds Mobile India Early Access test.

"Krafton is taking the concerns raised very seriously and has taken immediate, concrete actions to address this issue," the company spokesperson noted.

The spokesperson explained that similar to other global mobile games and apps, Battleground Mobile India is also using third party solutions to provide unique game features. In the process of using these solutions, some game data was shared to third parties.

"Battleground Mobile India's privacy policy fully discloses that the app may transfer some user data, with users’ consent to the privacy policy and choosing to migrate their accounts. No data has been shared in violation of the privacy policy," the spokesperson added.