Home Gaming Last month’s botnet DDoS happened because a gamer was mad at PSN

Last month’s botnet DDoS happened because a gamer was mad at PSN

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Remember last month, when a Mirai botnet attack brought down half the internet? On October 21, a Distributed Denial of service attack that employed swarms of unsecured “Internet of Things” devices was laser focused on a global DNS provider, making much of the internet unusable for many.

Here’s what Dyn, the targeted DNS provider, said of the attack then:

“At this point we know this was a sophisticated, highly distributed attack involving 10s of millions of IP addresses. We are conducting a thorough root cause and forensic analysis, and will report what we know in a responsible fashion. The nature and source of the attack is under investigation, but it was a sophisticated attack across multiple attack vectors and internet locations. We can confirm, with the help of analysis from Flashpoint and Akamai, that one source of the traffic for the attacks were devices infected by the Mirai botnet. We observed 10s of millions of discrete IP addresses associated with the Mirai botnet that were part of the attack.”

10 million devices, flooding networks with garbage traffic. Why? According The Wall Street Journal, it’s because one angry gamer was pissed about Sony’s PlayStation Network.

Says Dale Drew, CSO of Level 3 Communications:

“We believe that in the case of Dyn, the relatively unsophisticated attacker sought to take offline a gaming site with which it had a personal grudge and rented time on the IoT botnet to accomplish this.”

While Drew hasn’t said which gaming site, The Wall Street Journal has, saying that the entire outage was brought about because somebody was mad at Sony. According to Forbes, all it took was buying the attack on the deep, dark web for $7500. The attack lasted for less than a full day. Is that worth over R100 000? That’s money that could have been spent on – materialistically – moving to another platform.

Last Updated: November 21, 2016

24 Comments

  1. Kromas Ryder

    November 21, 2016 at 10:35

    “I am mad therefore I will make the rest of the internet mad.”

    Isn’t this exactly how terrorists think?

    Reply

    • Lu

      November 21, 2016 at 10:40

      *children

      Reply

      • Bruce Bielie

        November 21, 2016 at 10:45

        *aka terrorists (said by a non parent.)

        Reply

    • Alien Emperor Trevor

      November 21, 2016 at 10:43

      I’ll show you. I’LL SHOW YOU ALL!

      Reply

    • Jordan

      November 22, 2016 at 08:25

      I read that it was by people that had a lot to lose if Assange’s DMS activated when he was killed.

      Reply

  2. Magoo

    November 21, 2016 at 10:38

    Buying down-time for a company of your choice over the internet. What a goddamn time to be alive boys and girls.

    Reply

    • Magoo

      November 21, 2016 at 10:43

      Take down PSN: $7500.. hmm
      Take down Activision: $8500.. hmmmm
      Take down EA: $10000.. ADD TO CART AND CONTINUE TO CHECKOUT

      Reply

      • Andre Fourie

        November 21, 2016 at 11:04

        ROFL

        Reply

  3. Ottokie

    November 21, 2016 at 10:45

    The reason seems much to juvenile for this scale of attack.

    Reply

  4. Lord Chaos

    November 21, 2016 at 10:45

    Think I’m going to reinstall Lemmings, then think up ways to watch them all… expire.

    Reply

  5. Allykhat

    November 21, 2016 at 10:54

    The money was probably from stolen credit cards too to be honest. No ways would someone drop 100k out of their own pockets to drop a network unless they had some kind of massive financial gain from it.

    Reply

  6. 40 Insane Frogs

    November 21, 2016 at 12:10

    Clearly, someone has been watching too much made-for-TV movies….

    Reply

  7. ULTIMAELITE1900 .

    November 22, 2016 at 03:35

    I’m a cry baby gamer

    Reply

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