Image credit: Helena Kristiansson/ESL Gaming via ESPAT
The attack was targeting s1mple which made his team’s match against Heroic delayed by one hour.
While the meme ‘Lag on LAN’ is just that, a meme, apparently it was not the case for Natus Vincere during their match against Heroic in the Round of 12. In an apparent attack against a specific player, the match saw s1mple’s PC bogged down to the point that it was impacting his game and forced a technical break for an hour until the problem was fixed.
The lag first flared up during the opening round of the series where s1mple reported to the officials that his PC was lagging and impacting his game. The third map for the match was also impacted as the team at ESL launched an investigation to find the root cause of his slowdowns, and eventually managed to fix the problem after.
A statement made on ESL’s social media accounts later confirmed that s1mple’s account was targeted, not the PC or the LAN for the event.
The attack was made via Steam as all other unrelated applications were blocked on the tournament PCs to prevent any potential security breaches and cheats. Moving forward, ESL has implemented immediate measures to overcome the exploit and prevent this from happening again.
No one has come forward regarding the attack, but speculation is that the cyber attackers are looking to commit fraud by influencing the match to allow Heroic to be their preferred winner. The true motive and perpetrators will remain unknown until the investigation is complete.
