iRacing hit by cyber attack as DDoS brings the game to a halt

Popular pro racing sim iRacing was taken offline earlier today after a hack attack that has lasted over a week. iRacing is a subscription-based race sim that attracts hardcore sim racers to its platform but the attack rendered the game unplayable for a period of time.

“We have been experiencing intermittent DDoS attacks for the past eight days,” said iRacing’s Senior VP and Executive Producer Greg Hill.

“This has culminated with sustained attacks this afternoon and evening. Our operations team has been continuously engaged in attempting to mitigate these attacks from a bad actor(s).

“We apologize for the disruption to the service that you are paying for. We strive to provide the best and most reliable racing service and know we are not reaching that goal.

“We will continue our efforts to resolve the issue – it is a serious federal crime with serious penalties to use such methods to attack an individual or company. We are working with the proper authorities regarding this bad actor(s).”

A DDoS (distributed denial of service) is a pretty Neanderthal level of attack described by Cloudflare as thus:

“A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.

DDoS attacks achieve effectiveness by utilizing multiple compromised computer systems as sources of attack traffic. Exploited machines can include computers and other networked resources such as IoT devices.

From a high level, a DDoS attack is like an unexpected traffic jam clogging up the highway, preventing regular traffic from arriving at its destination.”

This unsophisticated cyber attack does not seek to gain personal data or files, rather to basically bombard the web server with enough traffic normal users cannot access it. It’s all a bit “what’s the actual point?” really.

iRacing is now back up and running and doubtless the company is redoubling its efforts to fend off the next inevitable waste of time.

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