Blizzard claims the person who launched a cyber attack against World of Warcraft Classic's servers last week has been arrested. The attack prevented people from logging into World of Warcraft's servers for a number of hours across the weekend.
"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 in a blog post. "It is our understanding that, within a few days, authorities were able to successfully identify and arrest a suspect."
At the time a UK twitter account, UKDrillas, claimed to be behind the DDoS attacks. They tweeted out targets during the outages, but it's difficult to confirm if they were actually behind the attacks just from their tweets. The attacks did seem to mainly target US servers, however, with only some UK servers affected.
This style of attack employs a botnet of computers and directs them to make requests of a particular server. The influx of messages bogs down the server, making it slow to process incoming and outgoing traffic, and it makes it impossible for it to run all the necessary communications of a multiplayer game.
While World of Warcraft players were naturally frustrated by the delays. They did at least get to experience what it was like back in 2004 when the game launched and players received the notorious Error 37 message. The "game login servers are busy or down" message. The good old days were Horde were Horde, and Alliance were scum.
This harsh stance on DDoSers might quiet down the attacks in future... or goad people to try and mount more attacks. It's difficult to say with botneter.
Featured Image Credit: BlizzardTopics: Activision Blizzard, World of Warcraft