Top ‘Overwatch’ Player Hacks To Rank: DDOS Attacks Abound

Beware the DDOS! This top Overwatch player is a hacker! Overwatch players are going to forums to relay their DDOS stories, in which they are forcibly disconnected from their games by hackers to rank up on competitive play, Blasting News reports.

So it’s a few more days before Overwatch wraps up its anniversary event. And although a lot of people are enjoying farming loot boxes from Arcade matches and Quick Plays, a lot of dedicated Overwatch players are still hard at work over at Competitive to rank up.

But even though it’s Overwatch’s anniversary, hackers are not sparing Overwatch players from the wrath of their DDOS attacks — and it’s ruining everyone’s anniversary spirit.

If you’re not familiar with DDOS, technically, Digital Attack Map defines it as “an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources.”

In Overwatch, the basic trigger to spot a DDOS attack is when someone is deliberately forcing people to get disconnected from the game, and the players are then unable to join back. This is particularly frustrating in Competitive since you will be losing SR points.

DDOS has become very prominent in Overwatch, especially in consoles, and it’s baffling why Blizzard has yet to put strict measures to counteract the hacking.

Check out this video of how DDOS on Overwatch looks like.

According to a Reddit post, an Overwatch player finds out at least one of the Top 500 players on the PlayStation 4 platforms is using DDOS tactics to climb up the rankings.

How does the DDOS-ing works? Easy. The hacker will send party invites to each player on the opposing team. If you accept the invite, you will get DDOSed out of the game. Just like that.

And what’s more annoying is this particular hacker, which is still unnamed due to “witch hunting” rules on Reddit, is openly bragging about his cheating. Some of the other things he is known to do:

“Threatening his teammates who decided to throw the game because they didn’t want to support a hacker (everyone knows his name in grandmaster for doing this, he is like an infamous celebrity), telling them that he’s going to hack their account and expose their IP’s on his website

“In another match, bragging about his hack on voice chat, saying that all enemy players accepted his party invites, and asking his teammates which enemy hero he should disconnect (a minute later he disconnects 4 enemy players).

“Countless videos from different uploaders, where he DDoS attacks the enemy and makes at least one of their players leave.”

And what’s even more annoying about this Overwatch DDOS attacker is that he was never banned and is still going about, DDOS-ing people with his main account like he doesn’t have a care in the world.

Another tactic DDOS hackers do, according to another DDOS thread on Reddit, is that the hacker scares the players and sends messages from multiple randomized account names.

“He sent my Playstation account like 200 messages or more from multiple randomized account names saying MINE NOW which I didn’t open. And claimed to be grabbing my IP. And as he was saying this my Internet went down for a couple of hours.”

The thing with Overwatch is that DDOS attacks are possible because of the lack of initiative to hide the IP addresses of players. This was the same mistake Ubisoft did with Rainbow Six Siege.

“This happened because IPs are exposed due the fact that Blizzard or Sony never masked them when you connect to each other. I am going to assume its Blizzard however because its far easier to isolate the IPs through the running application itself than through Playstation.”

PVP Live notes that DDOS hackers on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are particularly cocky since the console version doesn’t have the report button built into Overwatch, unlike in the PC version. This makes it harder for Overwatch people to report hackers, especially since Blizzard hardly responds to their emails.

Some people are blaming Blizzard, while others are blaming Sony for the IP thing. But at the end of the day, these DDOS attackers will only thrive if neither Blizzard nor Sony would own up to this flaw and fix it ASAP.

Overwatch‘s Anniversary event is still ongoing on the PC, Xbox One, and PS4, and will close on June 12. Good luck hunting those loot boxes (and hope you steer clear of DDOS attackers)!

[Featured Image by Blizzard]