Gamer holiday DDoS attacks are not a new phenomenon. The end of year holiday period has become a time for increased DDoS attacks, particularly those targeted at gamers. The holidays usually see growth spurts in the number of gamers online, keen to try out their new games and systems. It’s traditionally the period in which new games are announced, and gamers rush to buy them and try them out.
In December 2014, a hacker group took down Sony’s PlayStation Network for a night. This was quickly following the major attack on Sony Pictures earlier that year. Sony was celebrating its 20th anniversary for the PlayStation brand, and had recently launched the first ever PlayStation experience. Over 110 million users were affected.
Hacker group Lizard Squad quickly claimed responsibility for the outage, tweeting “PSN Login #offline #LizardSquad.” This made it appear to be a copycat attack of sorts of other DDoS gaming attacks the group had claimed responsibility for, including taking down the servers for Destiny, Call of Duty, Xbox Live, and game streaming site Twich.
In the same period, Microsoft’s Xbox Live (which has at least 46 million players) was also targeted with a gamer holiday DDoS attack. Lizard Squad also claimed responsibility for this attack, using a since deleted Twitter account to describe itself as the “next-generation Grinch”. Microsoft did not comment on the cause of network problems.
In December 2016, Steam, a distribution platform and multiplayer network for PCs, was the target of a gamer holiday DDoS attack. The developers of Steam didn’t publicly identify the cause or attacker, and it is possible that they were flooded with legitimate traffic as it was the first day of its annual Winter Sale, but security experts said a DDoS attack was far more likely to be the reason for the several-hours-long outage.
DDoS attacks cost companies an average of $40,000 an hour. The cost was likely significantly greater for Steam as the Winter Sale producers most of its revenue for the year. It’s highly likely that the gaming platform lost customers while its website was down; and potentially led to ongoing trust and reputation issues for the site.
As games have become more networked, the risk of DDoS attacks has grown.