Most of you guys have experienced the fallout from this over the past couple of days. I wanted to share a little insight into what happened for those that are interested.
A hacker group Called the "Lizard Squad" claimed responsibility for a denial of service attack on the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live. Basically, they flooded the servers with fake traffic which made it impossible for actual users to log on.
Why did they attack these networks? Nobody knows for sure. However, one alleged member of the Lizard Squad said the reason that they attack the networks and called in a bomb threat for a plane in which the Sony Online Entertainment President was flying was because "chaos is entertainment."
It is not quite clear what Lizard Squad's actual motives are. However, they said they could take down NASDAQ if they wanted to cripple the economy. Thankfully, they have no interest in doing so. They appear squarely focused on the gaming world (although they recently mounted an attack on Tor, an open source online privacy software.) Its possible that they simply think they are exposing weakness in these companies securities to force them to get better.
Its a noble thought, I suppose. Mega companies like Sony and Microsoft are not likely to invest millions into improving their services if they do not feel the need to. Its just a rather unfortunate position to put all of these gamers in. Especially on Christmas when so many children anxiously opened their new gift to find that they could not use it.
The unfortunate part is, Lizard Squad actually warned that they would attack the servers on Christmas earlier this month following a similar but much smaller scale attack. Apparently the voices at Sony and Microsoft weren't concerned enough to take more precautions.
According to an alleged Lizard Squad Twitter account, the attacks have ended. That account said that they had stopped attacking the gaming services around noon EST.
As of this writing, Xbox Live was mostly operational but PSN was still offline. There has been no update as to when we can expect the PlayStation Network to return to active status.
A hacker group Called the "Lizard Squad" claimed responsibility for a denial of service attack on the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live. Basically, they flooded the servers with fake traffic which made it impossible for actual users to log on.
Why did they attack these networks? Nobody knows for sure. However, one alleged member of the Lizard Squad said the reason that they attack the networks and called in a bomb threat for a plane in which the Sony Online Entertainment President was flying was because "chaos is entertainment."
It is not quite clear what Lizard Squad's actual motives are. However, they said they could take down NASDAQ if they wanted to cripple the economy. Thankfully, they have no interest in doing so. They appear squarely focused on the gaming world (although they recently mounted an attack on Tor, an open source online privacy software.) Its possible that they simply think they are exposing weakness in these companies securities to force them to get better.
Its a noble thought, I suppose. Mega companies like Sony and Microsoft are not likely to invest millions into improving their services if they do not feel the need to. Its just a rather unfortunate position to put all of these gamers in. Especially on Christmas when so many children anxiously opened their new gift to find that they could not use it.
The unfortunate part is, Lizard Squad actually warned that they would attack the servers on Christmas earlier this month following a similar but much smaller scale attack. Apparently the voices at Sony and Microsoft weren't concerned enough to take more precautions.
According to an alleged Lizard Squad Twitter account, the attacks have ended. That account said that they had stopped attacking the gaming services around noon EST.
As of this writing, Xbox Live was mostly operational but PSN was still offline. There has been no update as to when we can expect the PlayStation Network to return to active status.