The hit shoot ‘em up Destiny has been targeted by a cybercriminal gang thought to be behind recent attacks on game companies including Sony and Blizzard, creators of World of Warcraft, according to a report by CNET.
The attackers simultaneously targeted servers for the ever-popular shoot ‘em up ‘Call of Duty: Ghosts’, resulting in what the technology site described as another "ruined" few days of gaming.
Destiny’s servers appear to have been deliberately targeted with a DDoS attack, as both Xbox and PlayStation players were unable to access the service, which is thought to indicate an attack on maker Bungie’s servers.
The hit online shoot ‘em up shipped $500m discs to retailers in its first week on sale, and broke records for online downloads on consoles such as PlayStation 4. Publisher Activision described it as an "industry milestone", according to Yahoo News.
Destiny game servers: Deliberate attack
It’s another "big target" for the hacker group thought to be behind a weekend-long DDoS bombardment of Sony’s PlayStation Network .
A reported bomb threat by the same group which caused the diversion of a flight carrying a Sony executive, according to Reuters report.
Sony summed up in a blog post, "The networks were taken offline due to a distributed denial of service attack. We have seen no evidence of any intrusion to the network and no evidence of any unauthorized access to users’ personal information."
The group’s motivation for its attack was unclear. Shack News reported that the group also aimed DDoS attacks at Blizzard’s Battle.net, Riot’s League of Legends and Grinding Gear Games’ Path of Exile.
Gamers under assault
In a blog post timed for Cologne’s Gamescom this year, ESET Distinguished Researcher Aryeh Goretsky said, "Computer criminals don’t just target gamers: gaming companies themselves can be targeted as well. Probably the most well-known example of this is the April 2011 breach of the Sony PlayStation Network gaming and Qriocity music streaming service, which resulted in the compromise of the names, addresses and credit card details of 77 million user accounts."
"Readers should be aware that this sort of problem is not unique to Sony, either. Almost exactly, two years ago, Blizzard Entertainment suffered a data breach themselves, although they responded in a different and — this author thinks — more responsible fashion."
"The point here is that computer game companies and their associated services face real threats from criminals: if they charge customers for online play, the purchase of in-game items, or otherwise contain customer billing data in their computers, then those computer systems are targets for financial crime."
