Minecraft Shut Down After Attacks From Players

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So, as I was reading through the day’s news earlier, I read an interesting little story about the wildly successful online game Minecraft coming under attack by some unhappy players. I passed over it at first, not being able to make heads nor tails of it, but now that the attack has apparently ended (though a threat still remains) the details seem so silly that they warrant at least a mention.

According to the game’s programmer, Notch, the website became the victim of a DDoS attack, meaning “Distributed Denial of Service.” As a result, hundreds of non-confrontational Minecraft players found their accounts inaccessible. Because the attack was “Distributed,” it made it difficult to track where it was coming from, since it could be coming from multiple computers infected with trojans that the owners didn’t know existed in the first place.

As it turns out, the attacks were (possibly) done by a group of disgruntled players who thought they didn’t get Minecraft updates as frequently as they should. Like all big time hackers, the group took their story to 4chan and claimed responsibility, while also making sure to deny that they were regular 4chan users (which was probably a lie).

The irony in this story is, of course, found in the fact that shutting down Minecraft to demand more updates meant that Notch would have been too busy dealing with the attacks to actually produce updates faster. The attacks have since ceased, but some are worried that more will come soon.