France based video game publisher Ubisosft on Tuesday, July 17th 2018 suffered several series of DDoS attacks (distributed denial-of-service) which sent several of their gaming servers offline.
A DDoS attack occurs when an attacker(s) send junk traffic from multiple systems to flood the bandwidth or resource of a targeted system so as to force it offline. The targeted system or server at the receiving end usually gets knocked out when their resource have been exhausted while trying to handle the overwhelming traffic.
Ubisoft acknowldegd the DDoS attack which knocked out several of their servers including Ghost Recon Wildlands. However, Honor and Far Cry 5 were facing connectivity issues.
A Tweet from Ubisoft's customer support Twitter handle confirmed the outage and said they were working on to mitigate the attacks.
"We're currently monitoring DDoS attacks impacting Ubisoft services and causing players to be unable to connect to games. The attacks are focused on our games connections and server latency, which we are working on mitigating. Thank you for your patience as we resolve this," the tweet read.
As of now, it is still unclear who was behind the attack or what their motive for the was. However, during the attack, concerned users kept asking questions, of which one user asked if the DDoS attack posed any risk to their personal information or if there was need for them to change their password.We’re currently monitoring DDoS attacks impacting Ubisoft services and causing players to be unable to connect to games. The attacks are focused on our games connections and server latency, which we are working on mitigating. Thank you for your patience as we resolve this.— Ubisoft Support (@UbisoftSupport) July 17, 2018
In response, Ubisoft said, "We haven't had any indications that any information would be at risk." DDoS attack is the result of multiple compromised systems (botnet) which are used in flooding the victim with junk traffic.
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The aim of a DDoS attack is to send the targeted system offline. DDoS attack do not pose any risk to users data unless the attacker has already had access to their system via another means.
A tweet from Ubisoft later in the day suggest the company was able to resolve and restore the service outage.
"Thanks for the update! This situation is now resolved, and we are continuing to monitor the situation," the tweet read.