Xbox Live Players Targeted In Denial-of-Service Attacks

The BBC reports on a growing trend where some Xbox Live players are launching denial-of-service attacks against those who beat them or otherwise irritate them in games. Quoting: "'The smart thing about these Xbox tools is that they do not attack the Xbox Live network itself,' [Chris Boyd, director of malware research at Facetime Communications said.] He said the tools work by exploiting the way that the Xbox Live network is set up. Game consoles connecting to the Xbox network send data via the net, and for that it needs an IP address. Even better, said Mr Boyd, games played via Xbox Live are not hosted on private servers. The tools mean anyone with a few dollars can boot rivals off Xbox Live. 'Instead,' he said, 'a lot of games on Xbox Live are hosted by players.' ... For $20 (£13) some Xbox Live hackers will remotely access a customer's PC and set up the whole system so it can be run any time they need it. Some offer low rates to add compromised machines to a botnet and increase the amount of data flooding a particular IP address."

This is interesting...

[Anthony_Cargile]

I was just playing Halo 3 today on Xbox Live(hey, I get bored too), and I'd say 92% of the people I played were what sounded like 10-12 year-olds. One pronounced another person's gamertag, XdamnedsoldierX, "ecks damm-ed soul-digger"[sic], and after reading TFA I could only think: "So, the new conductors of DDoS attacks these days are no longer the smart, possibly disgruntled computer engineering majors of the 80's and 90's, but prepubescent kids who can't even pronounce words like 'damned' (despite using it online since mommy's not home) and 'soldier".

But from what this says, they can still be considered "script kiddies", since they still seem to be relying on the work of others to accomplish these misdeeds. Whatever happened to the good 'ole 80's and 90's when you had to actually know something about the trade in order to accomplish something like this? I'm not justifying it, but come on, whatever happened to working towards something? I don't remember the movie "WarGames"'s plot including the act of downloading some program to do his work.