Threat Management, Network Security, Network Security

World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Hearthstone and other games hit by DDoS

Games company Blizzard Entertainment reported on Aug. 13 that a DDoS attack hit its game servers for World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Hearthstone and other titles.

"We are currently monitoring a DDoS attack against network providers which is affecting latency/connections to our games," said Blizzard via Twitter.

On Sunday, Blizzard noticed that Down Detector, a tool for monitoring online outages, had logged more than 2,800 reports indicating an upsurge of problems with its gaming services.

In an email to SC Media, Igal Zeifman, director at Imperva Incapsula, said that even attacks that fail to completely bring down an online gaming operating call still have a severe impact on the service"Competitive online games are an attractive target for any DDoS offender looking to create large-scale mayhem in hope of some Internet notoriety," said Zeifman. "Moreover, such gaming networks are also particularly vulnerable to denial of service assaults because, unlike many other targets, they don't need to be taken offline to become unusable."

"In the case of a real-time online game, even a small amount of  latency, as a result of a technically "failed" attack, is enough to cause major disruption to gamers looking for a completely responsive and immersive experience. This is exactly what is happening in this case. Even if some users are able to log in, the latency they experience still makes Overwatch unplayable."

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