If you haven’t been able to play World of Warcraft because of some ongoing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, fret no more. Blizzard revealed that the culprit has been apprehended by authorities.
Just under two weeks ago, multiple WoW realms were taken offline by an unknown attacker. Overwatch players also reported issues when trying to join games, with some people getting kicked out of matches and getting stuck on the rejoin match screen. On Sept. 8, the Overwatch League playoff broadcast was even affected by another wave of attacks.
Blizzard addressed the issue on its forums, saying that it was going to take the steps necessary to fix the problem and get all of the affected services back online.
“Immediately after the Distributed Denial of Service attacks against our game service began, the Blizzard Security Team worked around the clock with local and international law enforcement agencies to track down the source of the DDoS,” Blizzard said. “It is our understanding that, within a few days, authorities were able to successfully identify and arrest a suspect.”
It took Blizzard less than two weeks to get its servers back up and running and apprehend the person behind the DDoS attacks. Blizzard should be able to learn from this and strengthen its network security so that situations like this can be avoided from the get-go.
