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
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.
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.
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.
