Posted on August 16, 2017 at 2:48 PM
Blizzard Entertainment Hit by Massive DDoS attack
Over the weekend, a series of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS for short) attacks caused the web servers of Blizzard Entertainment to have disconnection and latency issues in Blizzard Games, which included Overwatch and World of Warcraft.
The attacks began on August 13th, with the Blizzard’s official customer support Twitter account updating the users that they’re looking into an issue that is affecting their authentication servers, and warning them that this might result in slow or failed login attempts.
A few minutes later, the company tweeted again, this time saying that they are in the process of monitoring a DDoS attack against network providers resulting in affected latency or connection to their service.
This wasn’t all, though, because it seemed that the attack also made the Paypal payment option non-functional for the company, too. The staff had to make another statement in a tweet, saying they are experiencing issues with Paypal as an option for payment, said they were looking into it, and apologized for the inconvenience. But they kind of wished they would have acquired a better DDoS protection before.
According to DownDetector, which is a platform that keeps track of popular sites and if they suffer service outage or cyber attacks, the attack began around 11:28 AM EDT affecting website, log-in, and server connection.
At the time of writing this, some of the users still have login issues, and it is yet to be found out who is behind the attack. Blizzard has previously been a target for a hacking group named PoodleCorp, but the group has been inactive since, so it is more likely that a new attacker or multiple attackers are after the company and their users’ happiness.
One thing that is important to note is that this is the second time in a single week that the company has suffered issues with their service. When their Summer Games 2017 went live, on August 9th, Blizzard Entertainment suffered technical problems that affected Overwatch.
