Online privacy and security

Now for more than 4 years of active enterntainment twtich.tv has been the home for gamers, entepreneurs, trolls and even criminals. While at the same time opening new fields of endevour simultaneously putting online streamers at risk for their privacy.

            One of the people to catch the hype train to "free money" is James Varga aka PhantomL0rd. He was a professional League of Legends player who after 2 years of gaming carreer desided that streaming is more profitable than competetive play. Everything went like a clockwork until the 30 of december, 2013. On that decisive day a certain organisation called Derp desided to Troll upon him and a number of other popular gaming websites. Derptrolling (sometimes referred to as Derp) is the name of a hacker group that has been active since 2011. They have largely used Twitter to coordinate distributed denial of service attacks on various high traffic websites.

Initially, Derp sent a few tweets using their Twitter account to indicate that they were going to bring down the popular gaming website League of Legends. Their first attack however, was on a game called Quake Live. Hours afterwards, many of the League of Legends game server regions in North America, Europe, and Oceania, as well as the website and Internet forums were taken down. To bring down the game servers, they used an indirect attack on Riot Games' internet service provider Internap. They were revealed to have been targeting a popular livestreamer who goes by the name of PhantomL0rd on the streaming website Twitch. PhantomL0rd, whose real name is James Varga, is a 25-year-old professional gamer who regularly streams gameplays on his Twitch account and gets paid to play video games. Reddit summarized the report by saying that they had planned to use distributed denial of service attacks to flood traffic on various high profile gaming websites associated with PhantomL0rd, including League of Legends and Blizzard Entertainment's Battle.net. According to The Escapist, the group also issued a threat to take down Dota 2 if PhantomL0rd were to lose his game, which they carried out. However, they only crashed Phantoml0rd's game, while other games in DoTA 2 were running normally.

When PhantomL0rd asked members of the hacker group why they were attacking these sites, they responded by saying it was "for the lulz" and that it was also partially out of dislike for "money-hungry companies." They also persuaded PhantomL0rd into playing Club Penguin while simultaneously managing to take down Electronic Arts website EA.com. PhantomL0rd's personal information was leaked during the attack and released onto multiple gaming websites, in a process often referred to as doxing. This led to many fake orders of pizza arriving at his house, as well as a police raid on his house when they received reports about a hostage situation. According to PhantomL0rd, at least six policemen searched through his house, but they only realized later that the call was fake. The hacker group claimed to have additionally attacked several other Internet games and websites including World of Tanks, the North Korean news network KCNA, RuneScape, Eve Online, a Westboro Baptist Church website, and many others. A day after the attacks, Riot Games issued a statement confirming that their League of Legends services had indeed been attacked by the hacker group, though they have brought their services back online.

It is hard to summarise what exactly happened. One moment you are casually spending your time behind your personal computer and the other you are hacked by a group of total strangers who have seized you connection with the world and have threatened directly you. Is this normal? How one should defend oneself in a world where you are not allowed to go grocery shopping without someone keeping an eye on you?

For any additional information you may search google: Phantomlord hacked; online video game streamer hached.

Merry security and a happy privacy.