14 DAY TRIAL // The beginning of 2014, aka the last few days, have been filled with DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks against a wide range of gaming targets.
Throughout the first days of 2014, games like League of Legends, World Of Tanks, PlanetSide 2, DC Universe Online, Free Realms, or Everquest, were taken offline.
At the same time, services like Blizzard's Battle.net, Electronic Arts' Origin, Sony's PSN, Microsoft's Xbox Live, or Valve's Steam, were also unavailable, or users were unable to log into the different websites.
All these outages were apparently due to a wide array of DDoS attacks launched by various groups like DERP, which were just doing it to exact revenge on certain people or just to mess with the different regular users.
As of yet, the nefarious individuals, who claim to be hackers but just use various shady tools like the LOIC (Low-Orbit Ion Cannon), haven't been identified, although several attempts at finding out their real names or addresses have been recorded.
Even so, the new attacks once again show that even big online games or services have quite weak servers that aren't able to handle such a sudden attack.
Valve's Steam servers already buckled under a regular type of pressure on Christmas day, December 25, when Left 4 Dead 2 was distributed for free, causing a new record of concurrent users but also an outage that lasted for several hours.
What's more, Sony also came out rattled after the new attacks, as the fact that it shared servers across online games, like PlanetSide 2, DC Universe Online, or Free Realms, with its major online service, the PlayStation Network, meant all of them were unavailable for some time after the attacks.
It's hard to take into account potential DDoS attacks, but it's probably better to at least make sure that, if you do fall victim to it, your servers are capable of going back online and not causing collateral damage.