On the afternoon of 8th May, a game spokesperson revealed that "the current Battlefield 3 outages are a result of activity that appears to be aimed at overwhelming our back-end infrastructure. We are working on a variety of solutions to address this problem and are focused on resolution as quickly as possible... We are incredibly disappointed by these activities and the impact they are having on all of our ability to enjoy BF3, thank you for your patience as we work to resolve these issues."

Six hours later, the same person admitted "despite our security measures, we have been working around the clock to mitigate the impact of an ongoing denial-of-service attack on our Battlefield 3 game infrastructure over the last several days. While the motives are unclear, the focus of the attack has been interference with network communications preventing access to multiplayer gameplay." The attacks continued over a number of days, and the attempts to mitigate these by the game developers involved patches and restarts that effectively booted players out of games while they were implemented.

Ashley Stephenson, CEO of Corero Network Security, says that the Battlefield 3 DDoS attack "conforms with what our clients in the gaming industry have experienced, persistent and over several days. In this case it has impacted Battlefield 3’s back-end servers and prevented players from accessing multiplayer features in the game. So far it appears, according to EA that the attack was aimed at knocking the multiplayer servers offline and not as a diversion to pilfer data. The attack, however, has dealt a blow to EA, forcing it to cancel their planned “double XP weekend”. Whether it was timed to coincide with this event is unclear, and neither according to EA are the motives, but we have seen an uptick in what appears to be competitors trying to disrupt their competition as well as attackers carrying out attacks just for fun, or lulz."

But there is another explanation as to why games sites might be getting hit by the DDoS'ers, and that's simply botnet testing before rolling out financially lucrative attacks against the banks and other commercial organisations. In March, I was told by security researchers that the Brobot botnet was being used to attack online RPGs rather than the more usual banking targets. There's no evidence to connect the Battlefield 3 attack with these earlier gaming attacks, but there is some evidence that they were hit by the same Brobot botnet being used by the
Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighter hacktivist group, not least as the same newly developed attack tools were used against the game sites as used against banking targets such as Morgan Chase and Capital One.

Perforce Software has today shared five essential tips for software development teams to consider by way of spring cleaning the development environment. These management guidelines are designed to help maintain well-organized codebases as well as improving the overall development process.

Randy DeFauw, senior product manager at Perforce Software, told DaniWeb that he has seen the value of breaking down silos over and over again. "Ten years ago I saw a project hit a testing wall because the developers had never seen the test plan before final acceptance began" DeFauw says "Five years ago I saw repeated deployment nightmares because the deployment process was a bunch of sticky notes on someone's desk. And today in product management I'm seeing huge payoffs from making the 'done' criteria more visible."

Having all the important information accessible in one place is a foundation of Agile, DevOps, and continuous delivery. Which is why next week at the Perforce Software 'Merge 2013' conference, one customer in the shape of Intuit is giving a talk that touches on these issues, including using solid branching techniques for deployment data.

"Springtime is when software projects begin to pick up steam, but longer days don't have to equal longer delivery cycles" DeFauw continues "with a well-maintained and well-managed codebase, companies can have peace of mind while ramping up to launch various projects."

Here are those five spring codebase cleaning tips:

ONE

Use one tool to keep track of everything: Studies consistently show that poor communication is a barrier to effective delivery — and that this obstacle is more challenging among distributed teams. To overcome this hurdle, make sure everyone knows where to look for all important project assets and information.

TWO

Email is, at most, a reminder to look somewhere else: Documentation, deployment instructions, the latest secret to upgrading the database — store it somewhere safe. (Note: File attachments do not count as somewhere safe) The knowledge shared in conversations is just as important; keep it with the code to avoid digging through Outlook folders at 3am.

THREE

Plan for growth: If it does not scale, it is going to fail. That home-brewed deployment system hacked together last fall to push one web app into Azure will not work well now that it is supporting a few thousand concurrent users in a system with five tiers.

FOUR

Virtualization simplifies release engineering: Ever wanted to use real pre-flight checks on every commit? Or simplify five build channels into a unified pipeline to reduce dependency headaches? Modern CI tools provide the horsepower for the job by taking advantage of virtualized build farms.

FIVE

Manage deployment branches like code branches: Merging has to follow a strategy. After all, companies do not allow someone to randomly cherry-pick changes from a software branch. Not every deployment environment looks the same, and branching strategies for deployment data must take into account divergence, security and selective merging of feature toggles.

Mike Beresford, Managing Director of Randstad Technologies, says: "In 2011 and 2012 the number one priority for people was job security – now it’s salaries and benefits. Tech employees certainly aren’t the least happy in the UK, but employers must redouble their efforts if they are to attract and hold on to skilled employees as the sector grows. For instance, roles in IT infrastructure are expected to see a 10% increase in salary. However, that’s only half the battle. Last year Tech employees felt they were working the equivalent of one and a half jobs, and it’s clear teams are still as lean as possible. While cost is still a concern, the best employers make sure employees don’t feel stretched to breaking point. Workload management, alongside professional development, should be high on an employer’s agenda for maintaining morale."