Hacker Collective Claims Responsibility For EVE Online, Minecraft Cyber Attacks

Hacker collective Lulzsec on Tuesday claimed responsibility for cyber attacks on services for online games Minecraft from Mojang and CCP's EVE Online, as well as popular gaming website The Escapist. The moves against these targets are the latest in a string of reported cyber attacks against video game makers. Such attacks have gained notoriety in the wake of the major security breach against Sony's PlayStation Network in April. The new Lulzsec attacks - apparently DDoS attacks that overwhelm a server with requests - come shortly after the group claimed responsibility for breaching Bethesda Softworks' game servers. "We just wiped out the login server for Eve Online, and it accidentally took their website out at the same time," Lulzsec's Twitter feed stated Tuesday afternoon. Minutes prior, the group said it took down the website for The Escapist: "We're firing at Escapist Magazine with around 0.4% of our total ammunition. Let's see what their admins are made of - game is on, folks." And most recently on Tuesday, the group said it knocked out Minecraft's servers. "Just sunk the Minecraft login server, looks like their website also got hit from overkill: http://t.co/E3QnDYm not even firing at the site." The group later said Minecraft.net is now accessible but servers are "100 percent down." On Twitter, the group, which calls itself "the world's leaders in high-quality entertainment at your expense," has dubbed today "#TitanicTakeoverTuesday." Recently, Lulzsec also claimed responsibility for an intrusion on Nintendo servers. Update: CCP Games released the following statement to Gamasutra: At 17:00 GMT today, CCP became aware of a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) attack against the EVE Online cluster and web servers. Immediately, these services were taken offline. As an added precaution, all of CCP's infrastructure was disconnected from the public Internet. The CCP Security team is conducting a thorough investigation to determine exactly what happened and how, what the possible impact may be and, first and foremost, assuring that any personal information of our customers remains secure. More information will be released as it’s available.