Minecraft, Eve Online, and Escapist Magazine Among Latest Victims of Hacker Attacks

Merely days after I speculated that Sony (NYSE: SNE) was the inspiration for the numerous hacker attacks that have occurred over the past six weeks, the Washington Post reports that Minecraft, Eve Online, League of Legends and Escapist Magazine have been taken down by a denial-of-service attack.LulzSec is the hacking group behind the assault. Unlike the group's previous attacks, the Washington Post reports that this one may have been executed just for fun – not to send some kind of message.“The group did not hack the servers of these sites or take any information from them with the attacks, which were largely aimed at flooding the games' login servers,” the Washington Post writes.Eve Online responded to the attack by taking all of its services offline while reassuring customers that their personal information had not been compromised. On eveonline.com, Jón Hörðdal (the company's Chief Operating Officer) posted the following message:“At 17:00 UTC today, CCP became aware of a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) against the EVE Online cluster and web servers.“Our policy in such cases is to mobilize a taskforce of internal and external experts to evaluate the situation. At 17:55 UTC, that group concluded that our best course of action was to go completely offline while an exhaustive scan of our entire infrastructure was executed.“While some may feel that such a drastic reaction was not warranted, it is always our approach to err on the side of caution in order to ensure the best possible service for our players and the security of their personal, billing and account information.“We understand the effect this disruption has had for our players and apologize for not having been able to explain fully to the community what was going on. In these cases it can often be counterproductive to containment to give out information while we are in the process of evaluating the scope of any potential problem.“Our taskforce concluded at 22:05 that neither the game servers nor the CCP infrastructure had been breached. Further, we can also confirm that no personal details such as users' credentials or credit card numbers were exposed through this incident.“The servers were brought back online at 23:00 and we will continue to monitor the situation closely.“Again, we sincerely apologize for this disruption.”Hörðdal later provided the following update:“Shortly after service was restored to the EVE Online Tranquility server, the CCP Security Task force became aware of ongoing traffic flooding which prompted them to take the server offline. At 00:30 UTC, Tranquility was brought online again and is being closely monitored. Please be advised that we are prepared to take the server offline again if warranted. We thank you again for your patience and apologize for any inconvenience and sincerely thank you for your continued patience.”At press time, escapistmagazine.com was up and running normally. minecraft.net and leagueoflegends.com appeared to be up and running as well.