Earlier this month, World of Warcraft Classic servers were hit with a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack that made reliably accessing its servers a struggle for many players across North America. And now, a Blizzard community manager followed up to say that after a brief investigation a suspect has been arrested.
"Immediately after the Distributed Denial of Service attacks against our game service began, the Blizzard Security Team worked around the clock with local and international law enforcement agencies to track down the source of the DDoS," the forum post by community manager Kaivax reads. "It is our understanding that, within a few days, authorities were able to successfully identify and arrest a suspect."
Though it seems likely, Blizzard did not confirm whether this individual was the same person who went by UkDrillas on Twitter who originally took credit for the attacks. On September 7, when players first started complaining of server issues, UkDrillas would tweet out 30-minute warnings before another wave of attacks would make logging into WoW Classic nearly impossible on many servers. Shortly after, that Twitter account was deleted.
Still, it's an incredibly stupid way to get yourself arrested. In both the US and Europe, DDoS attacks are considered federal crimes that can lead to a prison sentence of several years. The UK is especially harsh, with a maximum sentence of 10 years.
WoW next big patch, Undermine(d), gets a release date, starting the countdown clock until my gaming time is entirely consumed with doing donuts in my new ride
Bobby Kotick says he'd never have raised World of Warcraft's subscription by even a dollar because 'it's a prickly audience, you don't wanna do too much to agitate them'
