On several occasions, the gaming industry experienced Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) network attacks. These attacks paralyzed many online gaming sites including Sony’s PlayStation (Jensen, 2017). DDoS attack forced many online gaming sites to go offline because of the huge traffic experienced. Online gaming customers also felt the heat of the attack because they could not access the services for some time, as the affected service providers worked to restore normalcy. Other organizations that suffered this attack were Microsoft’s Xbox 360 live, Grinding Gear Games, and Blizzard’s Battle.net (Jensen, 2017). The attack was a well-planned cyber –attack campaign.
DDoS is attack that lavages system vulnerability. The attackers take time to examine system weakness. The attackers make the system vulnerability the DDoS master (Jensen, 2017). The DDoS attackers use the master to identify other vulnerable systems to attack by introducing a malware or bypassing security protocols such as authentication controls. The attack on Sony’s PlayStation was volumetric or network centric. It overloaded the system’s network by consuming the bandwidth (Sperotto et al., n.d). This brought excessing traffic on the network, denying players from accessing their accounts. This attack placed the personal user details at risk (Sperotto et al., n.d). Debit and credit card information contained in the attacked networks were at a risk of being stolen by the attackers.
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It is not practically possible to avoid being a victim of network attacks but it is possible to avoid them. Organizations such as Sony could mitigate such problems from occurring by carrying out system assessment to reveal vulnerable areas that attackers might use to gain entry (Sperotto et al., n.d). The organization could also mitigate the problem from occurring by resolving denial of service-related weaknesses and vulnerabilities (Sperotto et al., n.d). In addition, such attacks could also be prevented by using network security protocols to deny attackers accesses into the systems.
- Jensen, C. (2017). PlayStation Network Update. Playstation.com. Retrieved November 4, 2017, from https://blog.us.playstation.com/2014/12/27/playstation-network-update-3/.
- Sperotto, A., Doyen, G., Latré, S., Charalambides, M., & Stiller, B. (n.d.). Monitoring and Securing Virtualized Networks and Services [recurso electrónico]: 8th IFIP WG 6.6 International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management, and Security, AIMS 2014, Brno, Czech Republic, June 30 – July 3, 2014. Proceedings.
