ESL says ‘targeted external attack against individual players’ was responsible for NAVI vs. Heroic delay

ESL has found out what made several players of Natus Vincere and Heroic lag during their round of 12 ESL Pro League season 16 match yesterday. The series was severely affected because of all the delays and finished way past midnight in Malta with NAVI beating Heroic 16-7 on Inferno, the map decider.

What the players and ESL faced was caused by a Steam exploit and not a technical issue related to ESL’s PCs. “The delay on yesterday’s final EPL match was caused by a targeted external attack against individual players,” ESL FACEIT Group’s senior vice president of game ecosystems Ulrich Schulze said. “After we identified the issue, the match could resume. We have taken several measures to mitigate this for upcoming matches, and have also relayed our findings to Valve.”

Michal Slowinski, a popular referee in CS:GO esports, went further in detail and clarified that the PCs are not connected to the public internet. “There is no public Internet, everything apart from Steam is blocked,” Slowinski said. “That’s why this “exploit” is so unique, it works like DDoS attack but through Steam, with Steam packets.”

These kinds of technical issues are uncommon in a LAN environment because of all the precautions, but there’s only so much ESL could do this time as the attack was coordinated through Steam. The teams are sure hoping there will not be more attacks throughout the tournament after ESL has identified the issue and taken respective measures to prevent it.

The EPL season 16 quarterfinals will kick off today with MOUZ vs. Team Liquid at 8:30am CT and Cloud9 vs. FaZe at 12pm CT.