Battle.net hit by huge DDoS attack

Popular gaming service Battle.net was taken offline by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that took services down for several hours.

Parent company Blizzard tweeted that the attack may result in high latency and disconnections for some players.

According to Downdetector user reports, the DDoS attack affected Overwatch, World of Warcraft, Diablo III, and certain Call of Duty titles. Players took to Twitter to voice their dissatisfaction, noting that these attacks happen relatively often, and that the players would love to see some compensation for the hours they couldn’t enjoy their favorite games.

Frequent attacks

“Nice, 3 hours lost on Monday, can't login again today, the worst of this, time refunded = 0,” one tweet reads.

“This happens a lot. Blizzard, can we get some sort of compensation? People can't log in or out, and people are falling into the maw, looping!”, another user says.

A DDoS attack happens when a server is flooded with bogus requests. As it tries to address all of them, its bandwidth gets filled, preventing actual users from receiving the service they need. You can think of it as a pizza shop taking phone orders, with all phone lines being taken up by fake callers.

To initiate a DDoS attack, a threat actor would need access to a large number of devices capable of sending tiny requests to the target server. These devices are usually called botnets, and are comprised of hundreds of thousands of compromised endpoints, routers, printers, smart home devices, and pretty much any other internet-connected hardware. These usually get infected with malware.

Last time a DDoS attack against Battle.net made headlines was in November last year, when the attack reportedly lasted about an hour.

Via: The Verge

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