14 DAY TRIAL // This past weekend, several servers for Destiny went down, both on PlayStation and Xbox, following a DDoS attack.
Players were booted from the servers in the middle of the game and an error message read “Cattle” on the disconnect screen.
The Lizard Squad hacker group claimed responsibility for sporadic DDoS attacks on the Destiny and Call of Duty: Ghost servers. They posted about their endeavors on their Twitter account, bragging about taking down parts of both servers.
Access has since been restored and players can once more return to their games. Understandably, players had been quite upset about their game time being cut short, especially during a weekend, and many have threatened to ask for their money back, thinking that it was a technical issue from Bungie.
“Destiny is currently experiencing issues matchmaking and login across all platforms. We are actively investigating this issue,” Bungie wrote on Twitter, although the message was later deleted by the company.
The attack comes after another one from August, when the PlayStation Network, Battle.net, and other online games have been targeted. It’s also when the flight carrying John Smedley, the Sony Online Entertainment president, was grounded after the same hackers issued a bomb threat via Twitter.
The attacks indicate that the Lizard Squad hasn’t disbanded and ceased its activities, as it was rumored earlier this month. The group’s website continues to be down, however, for unknown reasons.
What is DDoS?
DDoS is short for distributed denial-of-service attacks, which attempt to make servers and machines unavailable to users. Such assaults are done by two or more people, as well as bots. Basically, the servers overload due to the sudden and steep surge in requests.
DDoS attacks are increasingly frequent in recent years and their “popularity” seems to be growing continuously. Usually hackers target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers. The list includes banks, credit card payment systems, as well as extremely popular online services.
In recent months alone, we’ve seen compromised Linux servers following such attacks, as well as servers allocated to Sony and Microsoft, Facebook, and more.
The PlayStation network has been one of the favorite targets of hackers around the world and the servers have been taken down more often than they should have.
Such attacks can be mitigated, but it all depends on the level of security measures around a server, as well as the virulence of the attacks.