For those who have recently found themselves in their favorite MMOs standing in front of locked doors more often, it should be noted: This was due to a DDOS attack. Eve Online, Guild Wars 2, WildStar, and Runescape were hit the hardest. Over the weekend, League of Legends, the Sony Network, and even battle.net—including Hearthstone—were also affected.
Runescape hit especially hard, changes game rules in response
DDOS attacks are frowned upon in the hacker scene, as they require no skill and anyone can do it, it is said everywhere. It’s still annoying, especially when it keeps happening to the same games. The DDOS group has particularly targeted the MMO oldie Runescape. The servers of Jagex have been attacked so often that Runescape had to change the modalities for PvP deaths. There is a general warning against engaging in risky endeavors like PvP during this “difficult phase”.
At Eve Online, it was initially thought to be volcanic activity
At CCP, the Icelanders behind Eve Online, the DDOS attack coincidentally happened to coincide with activities of a volcano in Iceland. However, this has nothing to do with server outages. That was someone else. Eve Online was hit hard. According to a report, the servers were offline for 12 hours.
NCSoft with WildStar, Aion, and Guild Wars 2 constantly affected
A few days ago, we already reported on the ongoing attacks on NCSoft, and thus on WildStar, Aion, and Guild Wars 2. The frequency of these attacks remained high, but over time the employees seemed to gain better control, so that the last attacks only lasted a few minutes, while the earlier ones caused half-hour server outages.
The instigator of these problems has also claimed to be targeting the big names in the industry since the weekend. Now they have set their sights on Sony, League of Legends, and battle.net. Additionally, they are going after Twitch and causing general mischief.
The personal attack on SOE chief John Smedley had nothing to do with DDOS. His flight was subject to a bomb threat, so Smedley was sitting somewhere with his luggage. The group also took dubious credit for that.
Yes. My plane was diverted. Not going to discuss more than that. Justice will find these guys.
— John Smedley (@j_smedley) August 24, 2014
Mein MMO: The behavior of the one responsible for the DDOS attacks can only be described as childish and quite silly, even though the consequences are very serious. Since this individual regularly celebrates reaching a new Twitter milestone and plays strange power games with Twitch streamers, we can only urge you not to follow him on social media, not to tweet at him, not to contact him, or to get worked up about him in any way that might reach him. Anything in that direction ultimately achieves the opposite. Therefore, we and most other media have decided not to name him even when we have to report on it, as the incidents simply cannot be kept quiet. Anyone wanting to know what groundbreaking success has been achieved historically with this method can google Herostratus. He surely experienced a spike in his Twitter followers after his act of arson.
It is to be hoped that methods will be developed to protect better against such DDOS attacks or that companies will apply existing methods more meticulously. It seems particularly unfortunate that DDOS attacks hit especially small companies hard. And for us gamers: We would certainly benefit more if software studios directed their money towards new content instead of protecting against DDOS attacks, which are annoying but do not allow access to our data.
