Suspect who DDOSed World of Warcraft Classic is arrested

WoW classic addons
(Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment)

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.

 

Steven Messner

With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.