World of Warcraft fans were left high and dry for the second time in a month after developer Blizzard Entertainment’s servers were DDoS-ed yet again at the start of the week.
The dev said in a tweet early on Monday morning:
“We are currently monitoring a DDOS attack against network providers which is affecting latency/connections to our games.”
To add insult to injury, the Battle.net servers affected had apparently already gone offline in the past week.
PoodleCorp, which is thought to be an offshoot of the infamous Lizard Squad hacking team, claimed responsibility for the attack.
A day and a half after Blizzard’s first tweet it responded:
“#PoodleCorp is feeling nice today, 2k RTs and we will stop harassing @Blizzard_Ent.”
Soon after it claimed the attacks had stopped.
The DDoS blitz comes after Blizzard was previously blown away by a similar campaign at the end of August.
Gaming companies have long been a major target for attackers, as assaults can cause a huge amount of frustration for customers and financial loss for the company.
Imperva product manager, Ofer Gayer, said such companies have been hit by some of the largest and longest attacks on record.
“Since online gaming platforms are highly sensitive to latency and availability issues, they’re ideal DDoS attack targets. Mitigating DDoS on game servers is a particularly complex task,” he added.
“Gamers are very sensitive to the impact on latency, so what may be considered negligible for most services, can be very frustrating for the gaming community. This can be affected by multiple factors, most prominently the distribution of scrubbing locations and TTM (time to mitigate).”
Imperva research claims that DDoS attacks have increased 100% over the past two years, with 45% of gaming sites hit in the past three years.
Sean Newman, director at Corero, added that DDoS attacks are increasingly extortion-related.
“Organizations of all types can improve their posture with the latest breed of always-on, high-performance, DDoS defense solutions, or, alternatively, by choosing an internet provider who can deliver such defense as part of their service,” he added.