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Blizzard DoS attack affected Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, World of Warcraft

A weekend-long denial-of-service (DoS) attack which targeted Blizzard Entertainment causing severe lag for some players and preventing others from logging in at all, finally came to an end Monday morning.

The creators of Overwatch reported issues on its servers the day before and acknowledged that the attacks were affecting Overwatch as well as other games on its platforms. Heroes of the Storm and World of Warcraft were also plagued by the attacks.

“The DDOS attacks against network providers that we were monitoring have ended," Blizzard tweeted while Overwatch developer Bill Warnecke also confirmed the server problems on Reddit stating his company is "aware of a major service issue now affecting all Blizzard titles," and apologized for the hassle.

“Most services available on the Internet today are vulnerable to DDoS attacks and online gaming is no exception," said Sean Newman, director of product management for Corero Network Security. “With the chance for gamers to often get an unfair advantage by blocking their adversaries from playing, the motivation for launching attacks against these platforms is high."  

Newman added that the stakes can also be high for the providers that host the players of these games and, that the "only way to ensure resiliency, for what is often a soft target, is for the providers to deploy the latest generation of real-time, automatic DDoS protection.”

Although the attacks have ended for now the is no guarantee that another attack isn't on the way as threat actors have targeted the platform with similar attacks in the past, although these attacks typically didn't last as long. 

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