An unknown hacker, who goes by the name of ‘DERP’, recent began targeting many popular video-game websites with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
At the time of this writing, DERP claims to have disrupted service for the following websites:
- League of Legends‘ website and servers
- battle.net and DOTA 2 servers
- runescape.com
- EA.com (developer and publisher)
His most recent attack was on runescape.com, which still appears to be offline.
DERP also claimed his attack has affected the Runescape worlds (game servers).
Yesterday, Kotaku provided more coverage of the earlier disruptions, which all appear to circle around one gamer who goes by the name Phantoml0rd. It is unclear at this point if the attack on runescape.com is related to the same gamer.
To add insult to injury, DERP seems to like to “troll” his victims during his attacks, prompting victims to call him and asking them obscure questions.
However, some of his pranks may not be so funny for Phantoml0rd, especially when a SWAT team arrived at his house, supposedly investigating a “hostage situation”. In response to these events, Phantoml0rd posted a youtube video which provides a synopsis of the situation.
It’s unclear who DERP is at this point, or if it’s even one person. However, it’s likely that DERP has many computers under his control, possibly being a bot herder for a botnet. We’ll continue to update you with any developments on this story, so stay tuned.
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Joshua Cannell is a Malware Intelligence Analyst at Malwarebytes where he performs research and in-depth analysis on current malware threats. Follow him on Twitter @joshcannell
