One of the most accessible esports going, Hearthstone also proved itself one of the most open to denial of service attacks over the weekend, as three online tournaments were interrupted by attacks in two days.
Just two weeks after the first arrest related to the cyberattacks that bought down PSN and Xbox Live this past Christmas, authorities in the UK have arrested a teenager allegedly connected to the Lizard Squad group that claimed responsibility.
Last month, attackers took down the PlayStation Network for several days, embarrassing Sony and leaving tons and tons of gamers unable to feed their Destiny addictions for almost a week. This is all thanks to what's called a Distributed Denial of Service attack, where a person or a group of people send an inflated…
Last week, eager Christmas celebrators across the world hooked up their brand new Xboxes and PlayStations only to find that both online networks were down, leaving countless new games totally unplayable.
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Hacker group Lizard Squad claims it's behind attacks that laid low servers for both Destiny and Call of Duty: Ghosts today, leaving players unable to connect and play.
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Three of the biggest gaming services on the planet have been down for parts of the weekend, with DDoS attacks hitting the servers of the PlayStation Network, Riot's League of Legends and Blizzard's Battle.net (affecting titles such as World of Warcraft and Hearthstone).
Phantasy Star Online 2 is currently unavailable to play in Japan due to an ongoing DDoS attack, according to an official statement released by Sega (translated by PSUBlog here). Sega plans to compensate players for the downtime, and promises to release a follow-up report on Monday.
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Last week, a group calling themselves DERP launched DDoS attacks on the servers of a number of the world's biggest games (and games companies). It seemed like an awfully big list of victims for such a simple and ancient form of attack, but as Ars Technica explain, there was a bit more to it than that.
So stoked http://t.co/2MQRKhKwr6 is back up. Thanks for all the support, everyone! #extralife #ftk
— Extra Life (@ExtraLife4Kids) November 2, 2013
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Having a single website go down isn't so unusual. But in this case, bizarrely, the Smash Bros community has allegedly become a target for multiple distributed denial of service attacks (which disable a website's server with high traffic). Meaning, we're not just dealing with one downed website. We're dealing with…
EVE Online publisher CCP said in a statement that "at no time was customer data compromised or accessible," during a DDoS attack that brought down EVE and Dust 514 this weekend. "We will be looking at ways to compensate players in both EVE and DUST for the outage," CCP added.
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A favourite tool of hackers and other forms of online troublemaker, the DDOS - Distributed Denial of Service - attack is something we see a lot of in video games, whether it be people trying to take down a company's website or even, in some cases, crash the games themselves.
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Addictive indie computer game Minecraft was knocked off it's little block wheels yesterday apparently by a group of self-identifying disenfranchised Minecraft players demanding more updates from the game's creator.