Lizard Squad Returns To Take Down Blizzard Servers In DDoS Attack

Lizard Squad, which hit the headlines last year for high-profile attacks on the likes of Microsoft, Lenovo and several government agencies, has signalled its return with a major DDoS assault against gaming company Blizzard.

The attack, which started at around 3am last night, targeted Blizzard’s EU and US servers, affecting games such as World of Warcraft, Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, and Hearthstone.

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Lizard Squad was quick to claim responsibility for the attack, posting a summary of the results on its Twitter account, with Blizzard tech support also confirming the attack on Battle.net forums.

“It looks like we experienced a potential DDoS on one of our datacenters,” the company said. “Initial impact appears to have ended and our engineers put up some buffers to resolve the issue, and realms should start recovering. We’re continuing to monitor and work on mitigating the impact. Apologies for the inconvenience, and we’ll be sure to provide updates as they continue to come in.”

The attack is Lizard Squad’s latest against the gaming community, which offers a prime target for hackers looking to test their mettle.

Lizard Squad was able to disrupt the Microsoft Xbox Live and Sony Playstation Network online gaming services over Christmas 2014, with the latter causing Sony to pay out millions in damages.

A recent Akamai report found that the UK has become the leading originator of DDoS attacks, ahead of China and the US.

But the UK is also an increasingly popular target, after the report found that in the third quarter, the UK was the second most targeted country for web application attacks at seven percent of total attacks, with the United States (75 percent) taking top spot.

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