Hacker groups are targeting a number of popular online gaming services in the new year with a series of denial of service attacks that have caused connection problems for gamers. The latest of these services to be hit is Valve's Steam; its website and other features are currently down as of this writing.
The source of the attacks on Valve's service is being credited to two hackers who announced their involvement on Twitter today. So far, Valve has yet to comment on the Steam downtime. The attacks came just before Steam's annual holiday sale was about to be completed today. Update: Steam seems to be back online.
so we're launching more ddos dildo attacks at steam, me n @LARCENY_
— chF (@chFtheCat) January 3, 2014
The Steam DDoS attacks are just the latest in a string of similar incidents this week. A hacker group that calls itself DERP has claimed responsibility for shutting down Blizzard's Battle.net and Riot Games' League of Legends for brief periods. On Thursday, the same group posted on Twitter that it went after the Origin service run by Electronic Arts. Ironically, DERP seems to hint that their attacks are in the name of Valve's founder Gabe Newell:
We've directed the Gaben Laser Beam™ @ the EA login servers. Origin #offline
— DERP (@DerpTrolling) January 3, 2014
Origin's services were down for several hours on Thursday but EA's support page on Twitter says that everything has now been restored.
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