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Destiny and Call of Duty servers taken down by DDoS attacks

• Crisan Mircea
• September 29th, 2014

Over the past weekend, a hacker group known as “Lizard Squad” launched DDoS attacks to take down several game servers. The most affected were the North American servers of Destiny and Call of Duty: Ghosts, on all platforms.

A few days before their attack, Lizard Squad posted a warning on Twitter, in which they stated that there were going to be a lot of mad gamers during the following weekend. The group took down the Destiny and Call of Duty servers through DDoS attacks, which basically means flooding a system with an overwhelming number of requests, and making the servers crash in the process.

This is the second DDoS attack on these two games’ servers, as Lizard Squad had also crashed them last week as well. Bungie acted promptly and admitted that they were experiencing these issues, promising to fix them shortly. At the time of writing, they’ve managed to get the “Destiny” servers back up. These DDoS attacks are senseless, since by crashing the servers, the ones affected the most are the gamers, who are unable to play the content they paid for until the developer fixes the issues. Several voices claim that the attack is a form of protest towards the game publishers’ tendency to force gamers to be connected to the Internet all the time while playing. However, Lizard Squad did not justify their actions,so there’s no way to know for sure what caused them to do this.

In the good old times, when literally anyone could make a server for their favorite game and get users to play there, DDoS attacks were not such a big issue. Since you weren’t restricted to play only on official servers, you could simply switch from the crashed server to another, functional one. Now that’s not the case anymore, since games like Destiny and Call of Duty don’t allow you to create private servers.