World of Warcraft DDoS Takes Down Servers For Second Day In a Row

Published: September 8, 2019 4:30 PM /

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wow classic ddos

After being down yesterday for most of the day due to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, another World of Warcraft DDOS attack has happened today. This is affecting both normal World of Warcraft and World of Warcraft Classic servers as well as other Blizzard games like Overwatch.

Speculation began just over 20 minutes ago on the Classic WOW Subreddit that another DDoS might be happening as long queues for logging on and lag began happening as well as players being knocked off, with Blizzard announcing it a few minutes later.

The World of Warcraft DDoS makes it basically impossible for anyone to play. If they are able to get on the servers, which is no small feat, the DDoS creates a lot of latency and makes playing them a chore, and few to play World of WarcraftOverwatchStarcraft or Heroes of the Storm when the actions have serious lag issues.

Can Blizzard Prevent World of Warcraft DDoS'?

Sadly, there is relatively little Blizzard can do to prevent people from doing World of Warcraft DDoS' - by the nature of the attack it is nearly unstoppable if enough resources are spent on the attack. Essentially DDoS' or the heavier Amplified DoS use a variety of computer devices in a botnet to overload the servers by connecting in, or sending too much data at them.

There are a variety of methods that they use to get access to the computers, but essentially they turn them into zombies under their control and send them repeatedly at the servers. Mitigation techniques involve cloud servers or additional capacity than needed but, at a certain point the number of zombies will overwhelm the servers if the necromancer hacker (sometimes called script kiddies due to the relatively low barrier to doing a DDoS in code) spends enough time and resources on the attack.

What is behind the World of Warcraft Classic DDoS?

The extra visibility of World of Warcraft Classic is likely in part behind the choice of target in these attacks. A World of Warcraft Classic DDoS gets a lot of attention from people stuck in queues or kicked out of their game as there are millions of people watching and playing the games right now. If someone is wanting to demonstrate that they can take down high profile targets, this does so and advertises it quite well.

What could happen due to the World of Warcraft DDoS'?

While no particular person or group has taken responsibility for the attacks today, as stated in yesterday's article about the attacks, UKDrillas (Twitter account) took responsibility for the attacks on Saturday. At the time of this writing, that Twitter account has been suspended, and there's currently no indication that UKDrillas is responsible for this DDoS attack.

In regards to what ramifications these people can look to face from these attacks, earlier this year, a 23-year old who worked with 'Derptrolling' got 2 years in prison after a guilty plea for DDoS'. LizardSquad, who did a number of attacks, also had members face jail time when they were brought down. It's part of a pattern that has been ongoing and one that will continue to happen as the justice system gets more adept at dealing with computer crime.

Have you been affected by the World of Warcraft DDoS attacks over the last 2 days?

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Don Parsons
| Senior Writer

A longtime lover of speculative fiction, in almost all its forms, Don joined TechRaptor in 2014 on a whim sending in an application as he was looking for… More about Don