UPDATED – Hacker Group Takes Down DOTA 2, LoL, Battle.net, and PhantomL0rd Gets Arrested
Cyber attacks are swiftly becoming a common nuisance in the life of a gamer. This most recent one was something special.
Surely you will remember the massive Playstation Network security breach at the hands of LulzSec that resulted in the leaking of thousands of passwords back in 2011? If not, if you’re even remotely a PC gamer in this day and age you’ll have experienced outage of one of your favourite games, be it DOTA, World of Warcraft, League of Legends, or, more pertinently, pretty much anything on Steam, due to one of these targeted DDOS attacks.
Now, the night of the 30th of December, 2013, is a new date to put in your calender to mark one of the most concentrated and effective malicious campaign against a multitude of companies in the gaming industry, filled with twists, turns, and more drama than you can shake a botnet at.
The group behind the mayhem is known as DERP – which has been active in other, smaller attacks for quite a long time, judging by their Twitter history – and foreshadowed their rampage with a few ominous tweets before taking down the North American and Eastern European login servers for League of Legends.
Something special planned for League of Legends 😀
— Derp Trolling (@DerpTrolling) December 30, 2013
Not content with just silencing what is arguably the biggest game on the PC at the moment, DERP turned their attention to the comparatively-huge DOTA 2, and even managed to sink Battle.net: Blizzard‘s service for managing such small, unpopular games as World of Warcraft and Hearthstone. Even the EA website was struck down. Blizzard managed to sort their mess out relatively quickly, and Riot Games managed to get their League of Legends servers up again within a few hours.
The interesting thing with the DOTA 2 attack, however, is who they targeted. Enter another major player in this saga; PhantomL0rd, an immensely popular streamer of a lot of the aforementioned games and ex-pro LoL player. The hackers latched onto PhantomL0rd while he was broadcasting on Twitch and systematically attacked every game he tried to stream, from DOTA 2 to Club Penguin. Why DERP targeted this particular streamer is unconfirmed, but likely had something to do with the fact that he was the most-viewed streamer on Twitch at the time.
@PhantomL0rd no dota for you. #Offline
— Derp Trolling (@DerpTrolling) December 30, 2013
Later in the evening after the majority of the damage had been done, the two parties struck up a conversation on a Ventrilo server and broadcast the exchange live on Twitch. It bizarrely evolved into a Q&A session between the DERP group and Phantom’s audience, leading the group to reveal their motivations behind the attack – ‘the lulz.’
DERP vanished and Phantom went back to playing LoL on the only server that had recovered, but as it turned out, the juiciest drama was still to come.
PhantomL0rd’s stream went dead, leading to speculation from viewers that he had been hacked by the group he had seemingly come to amicable terms with, but the truth was far more interesting. Armed police turned up at his house, according to the man’s own Facebook page;
Another post appeared a few hours later, stating that he was ‘good,’ and promised ‘more updates soon.’ Since then, all there has been is speculation.
Why the police targeted PhantomL0rd is currently up for debate but one could easily argue that he was getting a little bit too involved with DERP, considering the highly, highly illegal nature of their activities in the hours prior to their dealings, leading some to question the streamer’s integrity. DERP have been fairly quiet since, but have tweeted their condolences to Phantom;
@PhantomL0rd You are a god of streamers. Hope you are okay.
— Derp Trolling (@DerpTrolling) December 31, 2013
More on this subject is sure to unfold over the next few days and we’ll update this with the information when it makes itself available to us. Stay tuned. For more detailed information and discussion, this particular Reddit thread was active at the time of the event.
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Updates: DERP Target New Streamer, and PhantomL0rd is back!
As if that was going to be the end of this story.
PhantomL0rd is back from his slightly bumpy night and had a lot to say on the matter. There’s a long video over on his Twitch channel, which you can watch here, but if you don’t have an hour or so to spare, here’s the short version; after he was targeted by the group, he was swept up in the intrigue of talking to this group, attempting to find out their motivations, and taking on encouragement from the rapidly expanding audience that had come to watch the madness. Police turned up to his house believing Phantom was the man behind this spate of attacks, and he had to explain himself; apparently, another hacker managed to get Phantom’s information and posted some kind of threat online. Pretty much immediately, the police reacted, and that’s that. After he explained himself, they let him go, and he’s spent the hours since receiving altruistic donations of pizza and explaining to his concerned viewers what the deal is.
Meanwhile, DERP’s spree was far from over. Once PhantomL0rd was in custody, they continued on the merry little way and apparently managed to take down the North Korean state-run news site…
North Korean state run news agency #offline http://t.co/pJppoPIt1X
— Derp Trolling (@DerpTrolling) December 31, 2013
… but apparently drew the line at accepting requests to target other, more heavily-armed countries;
As to the people requesting Iran, they have nukes that actually work.
— Derp Trolling (@DerpTrolling) December 31, 2013
In the hours since they’ve managed to take down World of Tanks, another popular online PC game, Lolking.com — one of the most popular League of Legends community sites — and just over an hour ago, Runescape was taken down. Interestingly, this latest attack seems to have been directed at yet another streamer, known as DontBeFail… the situation is ongoing, but you can check out his stream here.
http://t.co/SKNH9MjyCe Hey what world are you on?
— Derp Trolling (@DerpTrolling) December 31, 2013
We’ll see what happens in the hours to come, but it doesn’t seem like DERP are going after this particular streamer anymore. He should probably count his blessings for that fact.
At least DERP took down godhatesfags.com, and now have the Westboro Baptist Church in their sights. Justice.
Stay tuned to us for more information as it comes!
[GARD]