The sound of a Boomer in “Left 4 Dead 2” is a notorious sound. The gurgling belching noises cause you to spin in the direction it may have been coming from. You don’t want to get in a Boomer’s way. However, when you hear your paid Teamspeak server that you’re using to talk to the sister you’re playing with goes offline, you get distracted. Distraction can mean life or death in virtual worlds.

Who do I blame this distraction on? Hackers. Hackers have been running rampant this past month, causing me to get errors on my “Steam,” which didn’t allow me to purchase a gift that was on sale for my daughter. It also put a wrench in the exciting (that was meant to be sarcastic) weekend night plans of “League of Legends.” They took down the entire West Coast Teamspeak servers, which I pay for monthly for my own private server for family and friends to utilize while gaming.

A DDoS is a denial-of-service attack or distributed denial-of-service attack that  is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users.

The hacker group DERP (original, huh?) has used a series of DDoS attacks to bring down popular gaming powerhouses such as “League of Legends,” “Steam,” “Battle.net,” “Playstation Network,” “Teamspeak” and various others. The question that comes to every gamer’s mind is — why?

Apparently these hackers have a grudge against a gamer who goes by the handle PhantomL0rd. PhantomL0rd uses Twitch to stream live feeds of himself playing a video game. When questioned why the hacker group was targeting PhantomL0rd, their response to it was, “For the lulz.” Meaning for laughs.

PhantomL0rd was detained by the police on Dec. 30 and his house was searched. He broadcast his experience on his YouTube channel.

PhantomL0rd claims that “League of Legends” was brought down while he was streaming. Then he switched to “Quake Live,” which didn’t work either. DERP followed PhantomL0rd around from game to game, taking them down as PhantomL0rd tried to play them.

Events escalated for PhantomL0rd, who had quite a few pizza deliveries made to his house (one of which interrupted his YouTube video), and someone even called the cops, claiming there was a hostage situation at his residence. PhantomL0rd described the entire event, from the hacking to the time the police were called.

PhantomL0rd was targeted for having the top stream on Twitch at the time. Not only was he targeted — he was terrorized. He was wrongly accused of an act that brought down emotional and mental trauma. I don’t know about you, but if I were chilling out playing video games and my house was raided by cops with automatics telling me I had done something I know I had not done, I would probably have so many emotions happening at once that I may have passed out.

DERP used their Twitter (@Derptrolling) account to take credit for hacks and let the public know when and what hacks were coming. Whether or not what they say on their Twitter is legit is still up for questioning in my mind. They reported on their Twitter on Jan. 5 that FBI and NSA were at their door. Then, on Jan. 6, DERP reported that they “told the feds we were in the shower and they gave us a few minutes, we escaped through the window.”

All right,  let’s analyze this for a moment.

You claim you had the FBI and NSA knocking on your door. Two federal agencies, who are well trained, did not think to cover all exits, including bathroom windows? I don’t think so.

Obviously DERP is also a solo act, because there is no way that any federal agent would believe they were all in the shower together, if there were even feds at DERP’s door.

This is virtual terrorism at a new low. Although most of us don’t openly support hackers, gamers like me appreciate their skills. However, DERP is targeting innocent people, not corporations or organizations for any specific cause. DERP is obviously doing it for notoriety and laughs. It’s something I could never appreciate nor support in any capacity.