No, I’m not being sarcastic about Steam being brought to a standstill – a series of DDoS attacks really have kept users out of most of Steam’s utilities over the course of today. Rather, my sarcasm extends to the pair who are mounting these ‘attacks’ and consider themselves hackers, rather than just your average anti-establishmentarian douche with a keyboard and a deathwish.
Anyone could download a DDoS program and assault one of the world’s largest distributor of video games – it’s just that nobody’s stupid enough to do it.
There’s little to report about the situation, mostly because little motivation or necessity for it exists. Two people who have revealed themselves on Twitter under the handles @chFtheCat and @LARCENY_ have used distributed denial of service (DDoS) through the program Low Orbit Ion Cannon.
The tactic involves bombarding certain servers with absurd amounts of requests to the point where the servers cannot handle legitimate requests from users, and as such are rendered useless. As you can probably guess, this saturation tactic is illegal.
https://twitter.com/LARCENY_/status/419010211139944450
The motive? Boredom, by the looks of things. Other than the clichéd assortment of insults littering both their feeds, they also opened up to suggestions about what they should attack next. It seems social networking has given nonsensical hacking a true community aspect, with suggestions and reprimands flooding in from all over the place.
This group isn’t the only one to upset the apple cart either – a group also brought down EA’s Origin service earlier too. As if Battlefield 4 needed anymore setbacks.
It seems the group have turned their attention to Blizzard’s us.battle.net service, as well as taking great umbrage at character balance in HiRezGaming’s free MMO Smite.
As I say, what they’re doing is relatively simple, yet obviously very effective. It is also illegal. If they keep this up, it’s more and more likely that Valve, Blizzard, EA and whoever else they decide to rope into their crusade will mount one of their own. I doubt those involved will have a sufficient leg to stand on in defense of everything that they’ve done so far.
It may be 2014, but some things never seem to change. Happy new year, everyone.
graemefinch.com 
Thanks for sharing Graeme! It’s interesting to see a group of individuals attacking an establishment out of sheer boredom. Usually these kind of attacks exist to silence an organisation and bring down a website due to some form of content they don’t agree with.