Competitive online games are an attractive target for any DDoS offender looking to create large-scale mayhem in hope of some Internet notoriety

It has been reported  that Overwatch and other Blizzard services appear to have been hit with a DDoS attack that has taken the servers offline. Blizzard confirmed on Twitter, telling fans: "We are currently monitoring a DDOS attack against network providers which is affecting latency/connections to our games."

Commenting on this, Igal Zeifman, director at Imperva Incapsula said: "Competitive online games are an attractive target for any DDoS offender looking to create large-scale mayhem in hope of some Internet notoriety. Moreover, such gaming networks are also particularly vulnerable to denial of service assaults because, unlike many other targets, they don't need to be taken offline to become unusable.

"In the case of a real-time online game, even a small amount of  latency--as a result of a technically "failed" attacks--is enough to cause major disruption to gamers looking for a completely responsive and immersive experience. This is exactly what is happening in this case. Even if some users are able to log in, the latency they experience still makes Overwatch unplayable."