Notorious hacker group Lizard Squad made good on their promise, taking down several blockbuster games in a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Among the games targeted were Activision's Destiny and Call of Duty: Ghosts.
CoD Ghosts & Destiny #offline
— Lizard Squad (@LizardSquad) September 29, 2014
This is actually the second time the group has targeted these two games, previously launching DDoS attacks on Destiny and Call of Duty earlier this month.
Sunday night, though, the group expanded their activities, also targeting EA's FIFA, Madden and Sims 4.
EA #offline
— Lizard Squad (@LizardSquad) September 29, 2014
Lizard Squad first made headlines in late August as the group became famous for taking down Sony's PlayStation Network. Around the same time, they also launched DDoS attacks on League of Legends, Twitch.tv, and Sony Online Entertainment. They even went so far as to report a fake bomb threat on a plane carrying SOE president John Smedley. The group had been quiet for a few days before popping back up last week, taking down parts of Call of Duty: Ghosts and Destiny.
Being unable to play the games you love is annoying enough, but for games like Destiny, which relies completely on live servers to do anything meaningful, it's particularly frustrating. Making matters worse is the fact that your progress in Destiny isn't saved, so if you are kicked or disconnected from the servers mid-raid, or even just seconds away from killing a boss, none of your progress is saved. Last night, Twitter was filled with players bemoaning at what stage they had been kicked out of a mission in Destiny.
I know DDoS attacks or connection issues are hard to plan for, but if you're a developer creating an online-only game, might I suggest some sort of back-up plan that maybe saves a players progress for 10 minutes or so.
