Blizzard, the game developer behind World of Warcraft and Overwatch, was hit by another DDoS attack on Tuesday. The assault coincides with the final day of its Overwatch Summer Games event. In an update to an official Twitter account, Blizzard admitted the assault was affecting its ability to deliver services. Ofer Gayer, Senior Security Researcher at Imperva commented below.
Ofer Gayer, Senior Security Researcher at Imperva:
“Gaming servers are a top target of DDoS assaults; they have been hit by some of the largest and longest attacks on recent record.
Since online gaming platforms are highly sensitive to latency and availability issues, they’re ideal DDoS attack targets. Mitigating DDoS on game servers is a particularly complex task. Gamers are very sensitive to the impact on latency, so what may be considered negligible for most services, can be very frustrating for the gaming community. This can be affected by multiple factors, most prominently the distribution of scrubbing locations and TTM (time to mitigate).
According to our own research, in the past two years alone, the number of DDoS attacks has actually gone up by 100 percent – that’s twice as many attacks this year as last year and they are increasing in the number attacks and rate of attacks. In just the past three years, 45 percent of gaming sites were attacked, and 75 percent of them will get attacked again, as we’re seeing today.”
