It seems that those annoying cyberyobs that call themselves the Lizard Squad might have struck again. Sigh! It looks like they’ve run a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack against Blizzard’s Battle.net servers, stopping players of the popular Overwatch game from – well – playing.
A DDoS is cybervandalism that involves flooding a system with so much data that it’s unusable. If skillful hacking is like picking the lock to a door then a DDoS is stopping others from using the door by piling things up in front of it.
A few issues
Blizzard has clearly had a few issues with its gaming site Battle.net recently, tweeting on Monday that its authentication servers were suffering:
We're currently investigating an issue affecting our authentication servers, which may result in failed or slow login attempts. #BlizzCS
— Blizzard CS – The Americas (@BlizzardCS) June 20, 2016
Followed a few hours later by:
The technical issues we were experiencing earlier have been resolved. Apologies for the inconvenience!
— Blizzard CS – The Americas (@BlizzardCS) June 20, 2016
And then:
[#BNet] We're currently investigating an issue affecting our authentication servers, which may result in failed or slow login attempts.
— Blizzard CS – The Americas (@BlizzardCS) June 21, 2016
And finally:
[#Bnet] The login issues have been resolved. Thanks for your patience and sorry for any inconvenience.
— Blizzard CS – The Americas (@BlizzardCS) June 21, 2016
Hopefully the issue really is resolved now.
Doing us all a favour?
A Twitter user representing the Lizard Squad, @AppleJ4ckxoxo, claimed responsibility with a cheeky:
https://twitter.com/AppleJ4ckxoxo/status/744771254473863168
Followed by a sarcastic:
https://twitter.com/AppleJ4ckxoxo/status/744774355767406592
Blizzard, meanwhile, hasn’t confirmed or denied that the service disruption was caused by a DDoS attack.
A joke that wasn’t funny the first time
If Lizard Squad was behind the outage then it wouldn’t be the first time they’ve ruined the day for Blizzard customers. According to International Business Times, Lizard Squad hit Blizzard with a massive DDoS attack on 13 April, taking out World Of Warcraft, Diablo 3 and more.
You may also remember Christmas Day 2014 when Lizard Squad deprived millions of children and adults from playing games on their new Microsoft or Sony consoles.
We reported how a Lizard Squad frontman justified that DDoS attack with comments such as:
I’d be rather worried if those people didn’t have anything better to do than play games on their consoles on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
And …
I mean I can’t really … feel bad. I might have forced a couple of kids to spend their time with their families instead of playing games
That’s right gamers, they’re doing it for your own good!
Lizard Squad, and anyone who feels like copying their antics, would do well to remember that doing it ‘for the lulz’ doesn’t make it less serious.
DDoS attacks can attract seriously harsh penalties, and the fate of the equally ignoble LulzSec crew is a lesson in what can happen when those lulz start to attract attention.