Wurm MMORPG Offers €10k Bounty For DDoS Attacker Info

The operators of the multiplayer role-playing title Wurm have offered €10,000 to anyone who can offer information on the persons responsible for a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on its servers.

The attack took place just after an update to the game on Tuesday and despite attempts to get the game back up and running on Wednesday, it remains down.

If things go to plan with the new host, the game will be working properly at some point today, according to the most recent post on the Wurm site, and the new servers should bring better protection and performance improvements.

DDoS on Wurm launch day

“Shortly after today’s update we were the target of a DDOS attack and our hosting provider had to pull us off the grid for now,” said Wurm co-creator Rolf Jansson on Tuesday.

“We will be back as soon as possible but things are out of our hands since their other customers are affected. As we wrote in a previous news post we are planning on changing hosting anyways which should improve things for the future. We can offer €10,000 for any tips or evidence leading to a conviction of the person responsible for this attack.”

Wurm is just one of many gaming companies to have been hit by DDoS attacks in recent months. League of Legends and Battle.net were disrupted by server attacks towards the end of last year.

“It is unfortunate that Wurm got hit by a DDoS, especially on the day of an update. But it actually shows a bigger problem, where companies, and not just gaming companies, can have both a business impact but also a reputation hit on their service which may affect their brand as well as their income,” said Barry Shteiman, director of security strategy at Imperva.

“Gaming companies who have massive amounts of users of all ages and demographics, should take such attacks into account when planning their security strategy. It is not unlikely that these sort of attacks will trend and become a major issue for online gaming companies and their clients. On launch day, and attack like this can mean close of business.”

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