A prominent gamer who plays World of Warcraft and numerous other games had a very interesting night last night. Known only as PhantomL0rd, he told gamers all over the world what was happening as it unfolded last night. My husband was one of the roughly 100,000 gamers tuned into his Twitch channel while he was talking about it. This is certainly one wild story.
World of Warcraft, other games targeted
A group of hackers which call themselves DERP took responsibility for the hacking attacks last night on Battle.net, which hosts World of Warcraft, as well as League of Legends, EA.com, Dota 2, and Club Penguin. But as it turns out, the target wasn’t actually the games themselves, but rather, a prominent gamer who spends a lot of time streaming his games on his Twitch channel.
PhantomL0rd was apparently streaming one of his games when it was taken down by a denial of service or DDoS attack. He switched to a different game, only to have that one taken down as well. After switching around for a few minutes and finding new DDoS attacks on each of the games he was playing, he realized what was going on.
Needless to say, the longer this went on, the more gamers tuned into his Twitch channel. He has more than 350,000 followers on the game streaming service Twitch, and more than 100,000 of them were watching. My husband says that for 1 a.m. Eastern on a weeknight, that high number is pretty unusual.
Police raid gamer’s house
While he was dealing with the cyber-attacks, the police actually showed up at his house. He went outside to see what was going on, and an officer pointed an automatic weapon at him. They put the handcuffs on and put him in a police car while they went through his house. They were responding to a call about a hostage situation. After not finding anything, PhantomL0rd was allowed back in his house, and of course he went back on Twitch to talk about what happened.
The gamer apparently said something to viewers about just how tightly the police had put the handcuffs on him and how much they hurt.
Police call into gamer’s Twitch show
My husband said at that time the gamer’s phone was ringing off the hook. Finally he decided to answer one of the hundreds of calls that were coming in, and guess who it was? That’s right, another police officer. He took caller number 236 or 237 and put the person on the air, and it was another police officer saying that they had another call about a problem at his home. The officer said they were outside again, so he had to go back out there and see what they wanted.
Of course that’s a bit ironic because out of the hundreds of calls he was getting at that moment, what are the odds that the one he would pick up would have a police officer on the other end?
If you have an hour of time to kill and you’re interested in the full story, you can watch PhantomL0rd’s response to the police raid on YouTube. You can also check out his Facebook page, which has lots of fun comments from the gamer’s fans. World of Warcraft and the other games which were targeted appear to be working normally this morning.
