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Video gamers looking to obliterate hordes of beasts and monsters over the weekend were disappointed by a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against the recently released Diablo IV.
The attack seems to have begun on 25 June, when many players began to experience trouble logging into the game.
“We are investigating the login issues affecting Diablo IV and working to resolve these as soon as possible,” said a message on Battle.net, the game’s launcher. Blizzard, the game’s developer, said at the time that players could expect long queues to get into the always-online game.
But soon after, the message was updated.
“We are currently experiencing a DDoS attack, which may result in high latency and disconnections for some players,” an in-game message said. “We are actively working to mitigate this issue.”
A later tweet from Blizzard said: “We continue to actively monitor an ongoing DDOS attack which is affecting latency/connections to our games.”
The attacks then seemed to stop, but later on 26 June, the DDoS campaign started back up. However, Blizzard announced soon after that the attacks had ended.
The disruption to the game caused consternation among the game’s players, as the game is only playable with an internet connection — there is no offline component, even if a gamer wanted to play the game as a single-player experience.
Ironically, some of the game’s fans believe it’s disgruntled players who could be behind the attack as a protest over the game’s always-online functionality. At the moment, however, the identity of the attackers, and their motive, remains unknown.
Video games and their infrastructure have proven popular targets for DDoS attacks in the past. In 2014 both the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live were taken down by DDoS, affecting 160 million frustrated gamers.
In 2016, the infamous Mirai botnet was initially created to target Minecraft servers, though the Mirai malware has since been used in a raft of other high-profile attacks.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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