A currently-unknown group of hackers targeted servers belonging to Grapeshot Games, specifically servers used for their newly released game, Atlas. The attacks took place over several different days beginning on January 17th and ending Sunday night. The first attack took place after the attackers gained access to an administrator account and began to flood game servers with waves of extra objects, including ones that are not part of the game itself. The flooding of extra objects upset most players, but also began to affect server performance as well. Grapeshot fixed the issue and rolled back the servers for five hours, but unfortunately that did not stop the attackers. Over the weekend they discovered another vulnerability, which Grapeshot would not disclose, and began flooding the game servers with extra objects again. Users then began to see a flood of spam messages coming across in game communications urging them to “Subscribe to PewDiePie.” Grapeshot was once again forced to roll the servers back for an additional three hours but have claimed that the issue is fixed and they have banned the accounts they claim are responsible. Many have been quick to look to TheHackerGiraffe and J3ws3r who had been behind previous wave of attacks in support of PewDiePie, however j3ws3r has made no reference to any involvement on his part of TheHackerGiraffe’s part.
Analyst Notes
TheHackerGiraffe had previously made a very public departure from social media after the initial wave of PewDiePie support attacks when other users began to threaten him for what he was doing, while it is possible that he had some level of involvement in the attack on Grapeshot, it is still unknown who actually carried out the attack.
