denial-of-service-attack
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Trion's games DDoSed again
E-thugs are at it again: Trion's MMO services are once again under attack. Last night, the official RIFT twitter account announced, "Ascended, our servers are experiencing a DDoS at the moment. We're working to restore network stability as quickly as possible." On the official forums, RIFT Executive Producer Bill "Daglar" Fisher confirmed that ongoing RIFT lag problems are compounded by the attacks: "Adding on top of the oddities that people are reporting, we've also been under DDOS attacks and our network team has been working to minimize the impacts of these." Overnight, even the first few pages (five, as of the time of this writing) of the RIFT general forums were flooded with spam from attackers. Several low-traffic forums on the ArcheAge boards have also been spammed early this morning. [With thanks to Omedon for the tip and apologies to Daglar for the temporary demotion!]
RuneScape hit with denial-of-service attacks
Jagex has posted to its official forums the news that both modern RuneScape and its classic servers are in the midst of service disruption attacks. Moderator Tyran explained: As you may be aware, we're currently experiencing service disruption across both game and web services, this is affecting both RuneScape and Old School RuneScape. We are aware that RuneScape (as well as other games) are being targeted by attacks which are causing connectivity issues for our players. We are doing everything we can to mitigate any impact on your gameplay experience - our Systems Team are currently working to improve stability across our core hosting platform to improve the situation. The studio warns players to avoid high-risk content where items might be lost, but customer service will investigate items already compromised by the outages. A large-scale rollback is not currently planned; Moderator Ronan posted, "Unfortunately, Old School RuneScape does not have the tool required to roll back or to confirm what items were lost by players and so it will not be possible to refund any lost items."
Iran claims to have been hit by 'heavy' cyber attack, pins slowdowns on coordinated hacking campaign
Whatever you think of Iran's politics, it's hard to deny that the country has frequently been the target of internet-based attacks that sometimes go beyond the originator's plans. If you believe High Council of Cyberspace secretary Mehdi Akhavan Behabadi, the pressure is only getting worse. He tells Iranian media that the nation is under "constant" digital bombardment and was just hit with a major assault on Tuesday that bogged down local internet access. Behabadi unsurprisingly contends that the attacks are deliberate efforts to undermine Iran's data, nuclear and oil infrastructures, with a finger implicitly pointed westward. While it's no secret that the country's enemies want to slow down what they see as a rush towards nuclear weapons, it's difficult to know how much of the accusation is serious versus bluster: we've seen individual smartphone users who consume more than the "several gigabytes" of traffic that reportedly caused national chaos in the most recent incident. No matter the exact nature, it's likely that residents stand to lose as Iran fences off the internet to keep outside influences, hostile and otherwise, from getting in. [Image credit: Amir1140, Wikipedia]
Suspected LulzSec member arrested
Shhh. You hear that? It sounds like laughter. Lulzing, in fact. Could it be Ryan Cleary's future cellmate? Who's Ryan Cleary, you say? According to a news blurb at PC Gamer, he's the 19-year old chap recently taken into custody by the FBI and Scotland Yard and accused of spear-heading the LulzSec-sponsored DDoS attacks against EVE Online, Nintendo, the United States Senate, and the Central Intelligence Agency, to name a few. Cleary is rumored to be a former member of Anonymous, and a Scotland Yard spokesperson says that the arrest was the result of an extensive and ongoing probe into the rash of cyber-crimes perpetuated over the last several months. "The arrest follows an investigation into network intrusions and distributed denial of service attacks against a number of international business and intelligence agencies by what is believed to be the same hacking group," PC Gamer reports. Remaining LulzSec luminaries are seemingly unconcerned, if a message posted to the group's Twitter account earlier today is any indication. "Seems the glorious leader of LulzSec got arrested, it's all over now... wait... we're all still here," the message said.
