Blizzard has to contend with over 32 million active users in 196 countries. Demand has also increased over the past few months because more people are looking at online gaming as a refuge to spend time when they cannot go outside due to covid restrictions. Like all the big online services, Blizzard has always been susceptible to DDOS attacks, but this type of attack has been reported very frequently during COVID. It is not a surprise that hackers increased the number of Denial of service attacks during COVID on most online gaming platforms as these types of attacks are meant to gain media attention. Allow the hackers to gain notoriety.
What is a DDOS attack?
A DDOS attack is a type of attack to an online service like Blizzard that tries to overwhelm the servers with so much traffic that they will take a lot of time to respond, resulting in timeouts and, in some cases, can crash the whole system rendering the system unavailable. You might think that a company like Blizzard will have enough resources to protect against such attacks. In reality, defending against such attacks is not easy.
DDOS attacks can target different layers of the network infrastructure, covering attacks at the hardware level and the application level. The attack’s origin can come from multiple locations as hackers typically use a compromised system to launch their attacks. Making traffic look like it is being generated from a valid source.
Typically a countermeasure to DDOS is to block or slowing the traffic that is causing the issues however; such a countermeasure is not always effective. There are instances where hackers gain access to millions of computer platforms using a virus that will run a virus on the infected pc.
To counter DDOS attack, a company like Blizzard has to invest heavily in specialized hardware and software capable of differentiating from genuine user traffic and traffic generated by hackers. Typically, such measures can detect attacks; however, in some scenarios, human intervention is required to adjust to a specific DDOS attack.
How much does a DDOS attack last?
A DDOS attack can last from a few hours to several days. It all depends on the resources (computer power) that the attacker has at his disposal.
The cybersecurity provider Imperva reported on its blog that the largest application layer DDoS attack occurred in 2019. The attack was generated from 402,000 different IPs, span 13 days, and generated a peak of 292,000 requests per second.
If you want to keep tabs on what is happening on the Blizzard servers the best source of information is to subscribe to the Blizzard on Twitter.
