It is a fact that hackers carry out DDoS attacks especially during the holiday season but due to Coronavirus or COVID-19; companies are encouraging their employees to work from home. And while at home, there is no way one can stay away from gaming.
Blizzard DDoS attack:
Therefore, to ruin your stay at home hackers have hit gaming giant Blizzard with a massive DDoS attack causing worldwide service disruption earlier today.
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The DDoS attack was carried out on March 18th around 2:20 AM (GMT) when Blizzard customers took the issue to Twitter. On the other hand, the Customer Support handle for Blizzard on Twitter also confirmed suffering DDoS attacks. In a tweet, BlizzardCS acknowledged that,
“We are currently monitoring a DDOS attack against network providers which is affecting latency/connections to our games.”
The company further explained that it is “currently investigating an issue affecting our authentication servers, which may result in failed or slow login attempts.”
We are currently monitoring a DDOS attack against network providers which is affecting latency/connections to our games.
— Blizzard CS – The Americas (@BlizzardCS) March 18, 2020
It is unclear whether the DDoS attack has stopped since there has been no update tweet from the company. According to Down Detector’s live map, Blizzard is still suffering the aftermath of the attack especially in the United States, Israel, Bahrain, Iraq, China, Singapore, Malaysia, and Denmark, etc.
It is worth noting that Blizzard is home to some of the most popular games including World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm and Diablo Immortal, etc. The gaming giant has a solid customer base with more than 32 million active users globally.
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Nevertheless, it is probably not a good idea to DDoS Blizzard. In 2018, a Romanian cybercriminal was sentenced to one year in US federal prison for conducting DDoS attacks on Blizzard’s World of Warcraft‘s European servers back in 2010.
The 38-year-old Calin Mateias from Bucharest pleaded guilty in February this year to one count of intentional damage to a protected computer. Since pleading guilty, Mateias paid $30,000 in restitution to Blizzard Entertainment.
In a DDoS attack, a website or service is bombarded with a high volume of internet traffic until it stops functioning and eventually goes offline.
EA Sports service outage
EA Sport, a division of Electronic Arts is also suffering a global service outage. It is unclear if it is a result of a DDoS attack or the company is facing technical difficulties within however there have been a number of tweets from EA Sports customers complaining about lagging and connectivity issues.
https://twitter.com/ArbiHirchi/status/1240231116960923649
According to Down Detector’s live map, EA Sports is still suffering lagging issues in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Denmark, Japan, and Israel, etc.
If you are a Blizzard or EA Sports customer, stay tuned. This article will be updated accordingly.
Update ( March 20th, 17:41 GMT):
Blizzard is now suffering from a series of DDoS attacks affecting Bettle.net. In its most recent tweet, the company said that,
We are currently monitoring a DDOS attack against network providers which is affecting latency/connections to our games.
We are currently monitoring a DDOS attack against network providers which is affecting latency/connections to our games.
— Blizzard CS – The Americas (@BlizzardCS) March 20, 2020
A tweet at 8:15 AM, Blizzard said that the DDoS attack against its network caused latency/connection issues.
We are currently monitoring a DDOS attack against network providers which is affecting latency/connections to our games.
— Blizzard CS – The Americas (@BlizzardCS) March 20, 2020
As for EA Sports, there has been no update from the company on how it faced lagging issues.
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