Game developer and publisher Blizzard Entertainment has experienced a DDoS attack that shut down all of its games and servers.
In addition to that, rumor has it that one of the employees got all of his personal information spread.
Ofer Gayer, senior security researcher at Imperva for the Incapsula product line, comments on the news: “Gaming servers are a top target of DDoS assaults; they have been hit by some of the largest and longest attacks on recent 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.
“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),” he adds.
“According to our own research, in the past two years alone, the number of DDoS attacks has actually gone up by 10% – that’s twice as many attacks this year as last year and they are increasing in the number attacks and rate of attacks. In just the past three years, 45% of gaming sites were attacked, and 75% of them will get attacked again, as we’re seeing today.”
