August 26th 2014
The bank holiday weekend saw Sony suffer a multi-pronged attack from hacktivists in response to what the attackers claim is the gaming giant's low levels of spending on improving its PSN service.
The hacker/vandal collective – known as 'Lizard Squad' – carried out a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on PSN servers, causing massive disruption to the service, which has still not fully recovered. It is also claiming to have been working to sabotage Blizzard’s servers and interrupting Riot Games’ League of Legends, as well as Path of Exile from Grinding Gear Games. In a tweet yesterday, the group said: “Sony, yet another large company, but they aren’t spending the waves of cash they obtain on their customers’ PSN service. End the greed.”
Lizard Squad says it has planted an ISIS flag on Sony’s servers. PSN suffered a massive security breach in 2011, resulting in the exposure of thousands of user names and passwords – for which Sony agreed to a $15 million settlement. The new attack appears to be making the point that Sony has still not taken sufficient precautions to secure its online services.
As well as carrying out the attack, Lizard Squad tweeted a bomb scare to an American Airlines flight from Dallas to San Diego carrying the President of Sony Online Entertainment John Smedley, so the FBI is now investigating.
Lizard Squad has now turned its attention to Microsoft's Xbox Live, resulting in many users suffering from login failure.