Free Online Game Offering $13,000 Reward for DDOS Attack Information

Millions of computer users worldwide play computer based games for hours everyday. Most online games run off of servers, and most gaming servers have poorly implemented server security. A large number of gaming websites have been victim to vicious cyber attacks in the past months, and are still a growing target.

February 18, 2014 popular online gaming website Wurm, was victim to a DDOS attack, taking the online game offline for over 24 hours. A DDOS attack, or distributed denial of service attack is a method hackers use to take websites offline. It usually includes many servers or infected computers hitting a website at a rapid pace initially overloading the server, then causing it to malfunction and go offline. While the website is offline users trying to access the website are met with an inconvenience. When high trafficked websites get taken offline for just one minute, thousands of dollars in revenue can be lost.

The online community Wurm put out an official statement trying to find any leads towards who launched the cyber attack. Game Developer, Rolf Jansson, is offering upwards of €10,000 Euro, or approximately $13,690 dollars. Rolf Jansson put out an official statement February 18. 2014 which read

Shortly after todays update we were the target of a DDOS attack and our hosting provider had to pull us off the grid for now. 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 Euro for any tips or evidence leading to a conviction of the person responsible for this attack.

While Wurm remains offline causing a huge inconvenience for its customers, the owners are trying to obtain any identifying information.