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DDoS Attacks Takes Down Wikipedia and World of Warcraft

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Hackers targeted servers with a distributed denial of service attacks over the weekend. The DDoS attack took down online encyclopedia Wikipedia and World of Warcraft Classic. DDoS attacks takes websites offline by overwhelming domains or specific application infrastructures with massive traffic flows. Troy Mursch, with Bad Packets, Report confirmed that the DDoS attacks targeting the gaming servers and Wikipedia over the weekend were related.

According to Down Detector, Wikipedia was first hit on Friday evening for millions of users in Europe, the U.S. and parts of the Middle East. The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit owner of the Wikipedia domain, blamed the takedown, which continued on until Monday morning, on an attack of its servers by hackers.

While there has been no follow-up post from Wikimedia on the status of the impacted Wikipedia projects hosted by the affected servers, it seems that as of Monday morning, the website was back up and running, with help from web infrastructure security company Cloudflare. Wikimedia stated that the hackers didn't just take Wikipedia offline, it threatened everyone's fundamental rights to freely access and share information.

DDoS attack also hit servers hosted by Blizzard Entertainment, an American video game developer that makes the World of Warcraft games. World of Warcraft Classic users in US and Europe were targeted on Saturday. The attack is similar to a DDoS attack in 2017 that created latency and connection issues for Overwatch, World of Warcraft and others. It’s surprising that Blizzard Entertainment hasn't implemented proper DDoS mitigation tactics to handle these situations. Hardware solutions exists that could have minimized the impact of large scale DDoS attacks against gaming servers.

A Twitter account called UkDrillas claimed to be behind the Wikipedia and Blizzard DDoS attacks. There is no confirmation that the operators of this Twitter account are the culprits. The Twitter account has since been suspended.
,br> DDoS attacks continue to be a concern for companies. A 2019 Kaspersky report showed that while the number of DDoS attacks are down for the fourth quarter of 2018, the length of time those attacks last been much longer. The UK National Cyber Security Centre published guidance for protecting against DDoS attacks. Mitigations include understanding the points in company services where resources can be overloaded. It also includes ensuring that company service providers are ready to deal with DDoS attacks. Making sure that company services can scale to deal with surges in concurrent sessions. And finally creating an effective response, testing and monitoring plan for dealing with DDoS attacks.