Hasta La Gadget!

Be careful about who you beat on Xbox Live–you just may get hacked. Gamers have begun using data-flooding tools to boot players from the service, in retaliation for losing at games like Halo 3.

“There’s been a definite increase in the amount of people talking about and distributing these things over the last three to four weeks,” malware researcher Chris Boyd told The BBC.

Hackers are using denial-of-service-like attacks to target the IP addresses of users hosting games, effectively booting them from the server. The hackers obtain the targeted IP addresses through a number of means, including packet-sniffing software.

Microsoft has begun investigating these attacks, promising that it would ban guilty parties from the Live service.