A hacker group going by the name of ‘DERP’ has targeted a bunch of online gaming servers for what appears to be a bit of ‘fun’.
Talking through their Twitter account, it seems like DERP decided to follow popular Twitch streamer PhantomL0rd and crash every game he was in, as well as randomly targeting a few sites. DERP took down League of Legends, Battle.net, EA.com and Club Penguin, with each of the services now up and down intermittently. PhantomL0rd talked to members of the group, who said they were doing it “for the lulz”.
Then, apparently, the police raided PhantomL0rd’s house, with the gamer saying:
just had an automatic pointed at me, put in hand cuffs and sat in the back of a cop car as I watched as 6 policemen go through my whole house.. will keep you all updated.
As far as we can tell, DERP has mostly been DDoSing the gaming companies – a distributed denial-of-service attack, where servers are overloaded by tons of activity – the approach used by Anonymous to bring down the PSN, as well as by LulzSec to bring down Sony websites, rather than the more sophisticated techniques unknown hackers used to infiltrate the PSN.
At the moment, there is also no reason to suspect DERP for the PSN’s current problems, which is more to do with the huge influx of new PS4 owners and increased holiday online activity.
Update: DERP has also targeted World of Tanks North America, North Korea’s state run news agency kcna.kp, LoLKing.com, mca.lwcc.org, EveOnline.com, Minecraft.net, Runescape.com, godhatesfags.com, forums.station.sony.com, soe.com and PlanetSide 2.
Update 2: They have also taken down the PSN and DCUO, more here.
Update 3: Add EverQuest.com, EverQuest2.com, FreeRealms and VanguardTheGame.com to the list of targets.
PhantomL0rd’s official response:
