Youth arrested over Call of Duty DDoS attack

It feels like you can’t turn your back for a second without another story about distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks popping up.

This one, however, has nothing to do with WikiLeaks and instead involves a co-ordinated cyber attack against a website running the popular “Call of Duty” video game.

According to news reports, a 17-year-old British teenager was arrested early on Thursday morning by computer crime police in the Beswick area of Manchester under suspicion of using malware to make the “Call of Duty” website unreachable by many online gamers.

A malicious program called “Phenom Booter” is said to have been offered for sale online, giving purchasers the ability to score more points and stop other gamers from playing.

Activision, the publisher of “Call of Duty” contacted police in September when they noticed the impact on their servers.

The youth,…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.