If you had trouble signing into online games like PlanetSide 2 or H1Z1 over the past day or two, you can blame whoever’s going after their servers.
For the past couple of days, the studio Daybreak (formerly called SOE) has been getting hit by Distributed Denial of Service attacks that have rendered games like PlanetSide unplayable. They’re in the clear now, they say, but it was a rough past few hours.
As is typical in the murky world of internet sabotage, it’s unclear exactly who’s responsible for these attacks, but this outage followed some high-profile comments by Daybreak CEO John Smedley about Julius Kivimaki, a Finnish teenager who was recently convicted on various charges of computer fraud. Smedley threatened to sue Kivimaki and his parents — “I’m coming for you Julius,” he wrote after news of Kivimaki’s conviction came out.
Finland charged Kivimaki, who has connections to a group of internet troublemakers called Lizard Squad, with a two-year suspended sentence that involves no jail time. The charges involve computer fraud and security breaches but are unrelated to the high-profile attacks that brought down both Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network last Christmas. Lizard Squad took responsibility for those outages.
Smedley also has some history with Lizard Squad — in August of 2014, members of the group called a bomb threat into a plane the CEO was on, leading American Airlines to divert the flight for security reasons. Smedley pins the blame for this incident on Kivimaki.
“I’m extremely angry that the Finnish justice system chose to let Julius Kivimaki off with a 2 year suspended sentence,” Smedley wrote on Reddit yesterday. “This guy is the worst kind of bad news. He’s been involved for years in every kind of terrible thing you can imagine including Carding, hacking, swatting people all over the world. He’s also participated in a major way in DDOS attacks that caused a lot of grief for gamers and a lot of economic damage to the companies that make and run games.”
Comments
13 responses to “Daybreak Games Hit By DDoS After CEO Threatens Lizard Squad Hacker”
Because that’ll sure stop legal proceedings…
Or get more dickheads caught…
What did he think was going to happen? His statements were intended to scare a specific kid but they were clearly going to piss off the community he was a part of and that community isn’t known for mature, well thought out, diplomatic responses.
I was half expecting an “I told you so” from you after you predicted exactly this in the last article =)
Well to be fair I predicted that someone would take a swing at him specifically. If a psychic made the prediction I wouldn’t give them credit. =P
It’s unfortunate, but you don’t prod the beast unless you’re fully armoured up.
There’s no better way to test your defenses than threaten a hacker group!
could be the new method of stress testing, threaten a hacker group to save your selves the time and money of doing it yourself.
Lol, he had it coming
Even more reason to send that kid to jail. They are making an easy case for daybreak.
Unless he is a complete moron, he wouldn’t have had anything to do with the most recent attack.
There are more hackers in the world than just him, and the comments from the CEO were public, so there would have been no need for him to coordinate the attack personally.
In other obvious news today two plus two still equals four.
The kid knew full well what he was doing but since he’s 17 he is a minor, you can’t expect him to get a full adult sentence for being the identified guy in the mob.
I’m not saying Lizard squad are right, they knew what they where doing there goal was to make people around the world miserable, they are garbage. But it’s also wrong to scream into the wind (internet) like it will have an effect. You paint a target on your self and people will take aim. They aren’t justified in that action but there is little chance of them being caught so they will attack you.
The kid fled to Europe about two months ago, and Australia alerted Interpol and issued an arrest warrant. He might have been 17 at the time, but he was 19 when he decided to breach his bail terms and make himself a fugitive. He just keeps following stupid move after stupid move and it’s only going to get worse for him.
Shows how little interest I have in this.
The conspiracy theorist in me kind of thinks that Smedley not only wanted this reaction, but kind of counted on it. It just strengthens his case against hackers and adds fuel to his future campaigns against them.
Now that I read that, I realise conspiracy theorists are morons.