Wurm Online Offers $13,000 Bounty for DDoS Conviction
posted Saturday Feb 22, 2014 by Scott Ertz
On Tuesday, MMORPG Wurm Online suffered an attack, causing their servers to fail completely. The attack, a distributed denial-of-service attack, kept the service offline through Wednesday as the company moved their servers to a new host. The move was planned, but the timeline was changed in light of the attack and their previous host ending their relationship. A representative posted,
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. 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 Euro for any tips or evidence leading to a conviction of the person responsible for this attack.
This bounty, which works out to just over $13,000, is a reaction to the incredible level of attacks lately. The amount of bandwidth that is being consumed during these attacks has gotten to a level that was impossible just a few years ago. CloudFlare, a company that helps defend against these attacks and, therefore is a good source of information on the topic, said they recently defended 400 gigabits per second. The attack was so powerful it was felt through parts of Europe.
Instead of merely defending against the attack, which they did not, Wurm Online is looking to dissuade future attacks by encouraging insiders or relatives to turn against the organizers in a way that leads to a conviction. If more DDoS victims responded in this way, perhaps we would see less of these high-profile attacks, either because of fear or a lack of leadership.
Do you think this plan has a chance of working? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.