A Blizzard of DDoS Attacks on the Gaming Industry

It may be summertime in the Northern Hemisphere, but the first week of August has been marked by a blizzard. A virtual blizzard, that is, of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on some gaming companies. Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto 5, Nintendo Pokémon GO, the PlayStation Network and Blizzard’s Warcraft and battle.net  were all affected. The hacker group PoodleCorp claimed responsibility for the DDoS attacks, and says that it plans larger attacks.

It’s not at all surprising that hackers conduct DDoS attacks on gaming companies. When thousands of online gamers are locked out or booted off their games, it gets the attention of the media. Because hackers are often motivated to gain notoriety, the attacks work well for them.

What is surprising, however, is that some gaming companies have not deployed technology to detect and mitigate such attacks. The technology to do so is readily available, and more affordable than ever.

The stakes are high for the gaming companies because when they lose players they lose revenue. In addition, they lose money in terms of spending staff time to troubleshoot DDoS attacks, around the clock, which is expensive. One Corero customer, Jagex, experiences up to 10 attacks per day; fortunately they’re able to detect and mitigate those attacks—without consuming IT security staff time—by using Corero’s family of DDoS Mitigation Hardware.

There is no drought of DDoS attacks now, and analysts forecast that DDoS attacks will only increase in frequency, volume and sophistication. Until gaming companies get smart and defend their network perimeter, they’ll lose the battle against hackers many times in the future.

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