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The online services for League of Legends and Battle.net were temporarily downed by targeted Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks today (January 3rd).
The attacks followed similar attacks on the digital distribution services provided by Valve’s Steam and EA’s Origin platforms.
The hacker group ‘DERP’ claimed responsibility for the attacks on Battle.net, League of Legends and Origin in a tweet (below), while Steam was claimed to have been taken offline by a separate pair of hackers.
Kotaku reported that the attacks have been focused on a single gamer who uses the online username PhantomLord, attempting to take the games he streams from his Twitch account offline.
PhantomLord claimed on his Facebook page that the hackers also incited a ‘Swatting’ attempt – where the police are called to a fake serious emergency at the house of the target.
“Just had an automatic pointed at me, put in hand cuffs and sat in the back of a cop car as I watched as six policemen go through my whole house.. will keep you all updated,” PhantomLord said in the post.
DDoS attacks are generally conducted by forwarding a massive number of external requests to a website until the site’s server is forced to temporarily shut down to cope with the information.
Blizzard’s Battle.net service provides the backbone to many of its popular online games, including StarCraft, World of Warcraft and Diablo.
TARGET ACQUIRED! http://t.co/Y39Zvq0C4s (US) #offline
— Derp Trolling (@DerpTrolling) December 30, 2013
