DDoS Attack on Blizzard Games

The popular gaming server Blizzard was hit by a massive DDoS attack on 14th April. The folks playing games like World of Warcraft, Diablo III, Starcraft 2, Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm on Blizzard servers suddenly found themselves unable to log in. The Blizzard server boasted that the attack was lasted for two hours and there were more than 800,000 registered accounts and actively had more than 100,000 concurrent players playing online.

Blizzard has confirmed on twitter that the issues were due to a DDoS attack, one that took about two hours to work through.

The Blizzard tech support team also alerted and provided the statement to the users on Battle.net forum:
“It looks like we experienced a potential DDoS on one of our datacenters. Initial impact appears to have ended and our engineers put up some buffers to resolve the issue, and realms should start recovering. We’re continuing to monitor and work on mitigating the impact. Apologies for the inconvenience, and we’ll be sure to provide updates as they continue to come in.”

Two hours later they tweeted again confirming that the issue had been resolved:

Reports said the hacker group named Lizard Squad has claimed the responsibility of this brutal cyber-attack on Blizzard servers. They also claimed to have shut down the games for both US and UK Blizzard servers on 14th April.

This is not the first time Lizard Squad has attacked Blizzard’s servers, having done so once before on the Christmas Eve back in 2014. That attack was lasted for 24 hours for Xbox and around 5 days for PlayStation. FBI arrested many of the group’s members for those attacks, but it doesn’t seem like those remaining members got the message. They continued it and now saying that they won’t stop doing the same without having any fear in the future as well..