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September 1, 2016

Game giant EA servers hit by DDoS attack

News: Beta version of new major new title Battlefield 1 targeted by hacking group.

By Alexander Sword

Players of a new beta of the video game Battlefield 1 saw their activity disrupted after a suspected distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack hit the servers of games company Electronic Arts (EA).

Prior to the launch of an open beta of Battlefield 1, hacking network PoodleCorp tweeted about the “upcoming attacks”, and took responsibility for the outage during the downtime.

“We're currently experiencing an outage impacting EA games and services. We’re working to resolve them as fast as possible.” tweeted the EA Twitter account.

Both EA and DICE acknowledged the issues but did not say that it was due to a DDoS attack.

A DDoS is a type of online cyber attack in which the targeted website is flooded with traffic, designed to overwhelm the resources of the site to crash or suspend its services.

Sean Newman, Direct at Corero Network Security, said that the attack was “proof that organisations which depend on their online presence need the protection offered by the latest generation of DDoS defence solutions.”

Protection against DDoS attacks can include the ability to automatically provision additional bandwidth to cope with the influx of traffic from a DDoS and the ability to separate legitimate traffic from the bogus traffic involved in a DDoS.

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This is the second DDoS attack against a games company in one week. The release of an expansion to the online role-playing game World of Warcraft was hit with similar issues, which developer Blizzard attributed to a DDoS attack in a Twitter post.

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