14 DAY TRIAL // A 17-year-old teenager from Manchester was arrested by the Metropolitan Police for launching distributed denial-of-service attacks against official Call of Duty gaming servers.
The Police Central e-crime Unit (PCeU) launched an investigation after receiving a complaint from Activision about a commercial DDoS service called the Phenom Booter.
In gaming parlance forcing a player or more to disconnect from a game server is referred to as host booting. In consequence, the DDoS tools capable of doing this are called booters.
According to a description of Phenom Booter, the software is coded in PHP, AJAX, MySQL, CSS and JavaScript and customers are offered 2 minutes of booting time.
“This booter is made to boot down Web servers/home connections/ XBOX live/Steam servers. We use all shells at once and we have many unique shells/private shells e.g. hosted on VPS/100MPBS lines,” the service’s creators boast.
Police tracked down the main Phenom Booter server to an IP address in the Greater Manchester area and further investigation led them to the 17-year-old teenager from Beswick, who was taken into custody yesterday and faces charges under the Computer Misuse Act.
"Online gaming is a major retail sector with millions of titles being sold in the run-up to Christmas worldwide. Programs marketed in order to disrupt the online infrastructure not only affect individual players but have commercial and reputational consequences for the companies concerned.
"These games attract both children and young people to the online environment and this type of crime can often be the precursor to further offending in more traditional areas of online crime," Detective Inspector Paul Hoare told the BBC.
DDoS is quite common in the online gaming business and community, but its consequences can sometimes be far reaching. An attack against a gaming server doesn’t affect only its owner, but can cripple the entire infrastructure of the hosting company.
In May 2009, a chain reaction following DDoS attacks launched by two rival game site owners, led to serious Internet disruptions across five Chinese provinces.