It wasn’t a great weekend for video game fans, as players of Diablo IV multiplayer role-playing game were greeted with an error message as it tried to connect to the servers of developer Blizzard:
BREAKING NEWS
We are currently experiencing a DDoS a
It wasn’t a great weekend for video game fans, as players of Diablo IV multiplayer role-playing game were greeted with an error message as it tried to connect to the servers of developer Blizzard:
BREAKING NEWS
We are currently experiencing a DDoS attack, which may result in high latency and disconnections for some players. We are actively working to mitigate this issue.
Yes, someone had taken it upon themselves to launch a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack against Diablo IV, less than one month after it launched on PlayStation, XBox, and Windows.
According to a Kotakureport, some players were prevented from accessing the game for close to 12 hours.
This would be frustrating enough for people who wanted to play Diablo IV with their friends, but what makes things worse is that Diablo IV requires players to be connected to the internet even if they are playing in completely single-player mode.
As you can probably guess, some gamers are less than impressed by that particular design decision by Blizzard’s developers.
Diablo IV is far from the first video game to tussle with toerags launching DDoS attacks, and I’ll wager it won’t be the last.
Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon’s Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy.
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Andy Curtis is an award-winning security consultant, researcher and public speaker. He has been working in the computer security industry since the early 1990s, having been employed by state and federal government, leading healthcare and banking providers across three continents. He has given talks about computer security for some of the world’s largest companies, worked with law enforcement agencies on investigations into hacking groups, and is a regular voice on TV and radio explaining IT security threats.
