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SEC572 Lab1
SEC572 Lab1
Chandra Beasley
Keller Graduate School of Management
SEC 572
Professor George Mikulski
October 29, 2016
10 million subscribers. Due to the attack and lack of foresight from Blizzard they dropped 2.9
million users from last year.
Probable motivation(s) and Creators of the attack: The Lizard Squad was the one who carried out
the attack. The motivation seems to be corporate greed, claimed the excesses of the video game
industry as justification for its attacks: things like how they believed Sony was charging too
much for Playstation Network without investing that money back into server infrastructure. But
at times, it feels like the reasons hardly matter. Malicious digital attacks dog video game culture
in much the same way as harassment and misogyny: the darker side of courting an inevitably
tech-savvy audience (Makuch).
Deployment, propagation, or release strategy of the attack: I have been looking all over the
website and am not finding how the hacker group Lizard Squad did their DDoS attack. But I am
going to guess that it was created by using a botnet armies of zombie on Windows PCs. The
whole point is to cause havoc on the corporations end making them scramble and pay the price.
With this I would think it would just be as easy as a couple of chats through IRC or some forums,
get a synchronized time-frame (Release date of an expansion that is open to public), once that
time-frame shows up, release the hounds.
Published countermeasures against the attack and regaining normality: So during the initial
attack, Blizzards response was to just lower the limit of players per realm to try to counter
balance the DDoS attack. This helped somewhat, but the issue remained until they did a four
hour maintenance. All NA realms will undergo a 4 hour maintenance window beginning at 5:00
a.m. PST to address issues with realm stability (Blizzard, 2014). Within this time frame
Blizzard started to patch multiple issues at once. The interesting part about this is during the
attack they used this as a catalyst to fix their issues within the game itself. Besides the attack,
Blizzard told users its largest issue was the concentration of players in specific areas and
zones. The developer has been working on maintenance issues since 5 a.m. PST on Friday,
anticipating that the process will last around four hours (Elise).
Recommended incident reporting measures: What happened? Why did it happen? How did we
respond and recover? How might we prevent similar issues from occurring again? This way they
can get a better understanding on how to better prevent this in the future and also have that
transparency when it comes to their consumers.
References
Digitalattackmap.com,. 'Digital Attack Map'. N.p., 2015. Web. 29 Nov. 2016.
Elise, Abigail. ''World Of Warcraft: Warlords Of Draenor' Hit By Serious Ddos Attack, Blizzard
Scrambles To Fix Damage'. International Business Times. N.p., 2014. Web. 29 Nov. 2016.
IGN,. 'Warlords Of Draenor Recovering From Launch Day Ddos Attack - IGN'. N.p., 2015. Web.
29 Nov. 2016.
Makuch, Eddie. 'World Of Warcraft Loses Nearly 3 Million Subscribers In Three Months'.
GameSpot. N.p., 2015. Web. 29 Nov. 2016.
Starr, Michelle. 'World Of Warcraft Servers Taken Down By Ddos - CNET'. CNET. N.p., 2014.
Web. 29 Nov. 2016.