Blizzard’s Battle.net taken offline by hackers

Lizard Squad takes massive cloud gaming platform offline

Hacking collective Lizard Squad is claiming responsibility for a DDoS attack that last night caused major disruption to Battle.net, the network that supports Activision-Blizzard’s flagship games World of Warcraft, Diablo 3, Starcraft 2 and Hearthstone.

DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks are a crude but relatively effective way of taking websites and online services, such as cloud gaming platforms and websites, offline completely or causing major disruption. Frequently, the objective is simply to cause inconvenience to the target and its customers – in this case, the several million combined subscribers to these four games – but can also sometimes be used as a distraction technique for a more serious attack.

Blizzard’s customer services Twitter account first acknowledged an “issue affecting [its] authentication servers, which may result in failed or slow login attempts” at 2.37am BST, before confirming it was suffering a DDoS attack roughly 30 minutes later. In total, the attack lasted approximately two-and-a-half hours. For the full article click here 

from hacker samurai http://ift.tt/1SGzDHi
via IFTTT