Valve’s Steam platform, Activision Blizzard’s Battle.net and EA’s Origin storefront were all brought down last night by Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks — as an ongoing campaign by digital miscreants started earlier this week continued, leaving players and developers in the lurch.
We've directed the Gaben Laser Beam™ @ the EA login servers. Origin #offline
— Derp Trolling (@DerpTrolling) January 3, 2014
A group, known only as DERP, kicked things off last night by attacking Origin with what they call the Gaben Laser Beam, a reference to Valve co-founder Gabe Newell. Following that, a pair of Twitter accounts claimed responsibility for a Steam outage, followed by an outage at Battle.net.
https://twitter.com/chFtheCat/statuses/418987015959363584
It’s been a rough week for gaming services, following a number of attacks by DERP earlier in the week that brought down DotA 2, League of Legends, Battle.net and other games. At this point, the attacks seem to only be an inconvenience, and it doesn’t appear that the companies involved have lost any sensitive data as a result. Steam was laid low last week after high demand for free copies of “Left 4 Dead 2” flooded the company’s servers with traffic.
Still, at this point, it seems like this weekend is going to be a crapshoot for people who are interested in getting some gaming done in the new year. LARCENY, one of the Twitter accounts associated with last night’s attack on Steam, tweeted that there’s more on the way tomorrow.
https://twitter.com/LARCENY_/status/419047506123583488
