Swedish Online Gaming Ceases Due to EA Cyberattack and Internet Shutdown
This week, Sweden's internet went down, causing potential problems for millions of online gamblers. The country is known for being a popular online hub, and the 2014 World Series of Poker Main Event winner, Martin Jacobson, is from Scandinavia.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, the Swedish Internet was taken offline due to an attack by Lizard Squad, a well-known group of hackers. They targeted Electronic Arts' gaming network, which is based in Stockholm. EA runs its "Battlefield" franchise from this location, among other titles.
Lizard Squad took responsibility for the cyber attack on Twitter, saying, "EA #offline #LizardSquad." According to Telia, Sweden's largest internet service provider, the hackers carried out distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) on the EA network, overloading it and ultimately shutting it down.
Telia serves more Swedish users than any other company in the country, with over 1.2 million residential accounts. They also provide services to EA, which is why when the gaming site was flooded with data, Telia also experienced disruptions in its operations.
At around 10 PM on Tuesday, Telia's customers experienced a halt in internet, television, and VoIP services. On Wednesday, the disruptions continued intermittently as the assault on EA continued.
Telia worked to find the cause and a solution to the issue, and by Thursday, they announced a resolution had been put in place. Marcus Haglund, a press officer for the company, said, "We have an internal investigation running to the bottom of what has happened and what we can do to prevent it in the future. We've corrected a configuration that was a bit lax yesterday."
However, this wasn't entirely true as Telia reported on their corporate website that they were still dealing with outages and problems on Friday due to ongoing DDoS attacks.
What is a DDoS attack?
In a DDoS attack, the attacker creates a massive amount of traffic to a website, overwhelming the network to the point of crashing it completely. Bots or zombie computers are typically used to infiltrate the servers.
These bot armies use corrupted computers to send connection requests to uncorrupted machines called reflectors. When the reflector receives the request, it doesn't see the zombie but the actual victim of the attack. The two continue communicating, and in the process, they slow down or even completely discontinue the network.
Some of the biggest websites on the web have been targeted by DDoS attacks, including Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, and CNN. Stopping malware is no easy task.
Sweden Disrupted
Telia CEO Johan Dennelind said of the attack, "It really shows the vulnerability of our era. We haven't seen an attack on this scale before." The exact number of Telia's 1.2 million accounts that were impacted was not revealed. However, Dennelind called the situation "severe" and stated that "Sweden wasn't working."
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