Sony’s Playstation Network is now back online after three days. The service was down after a cyber-attack late last week. There were multiple networks, including PSN, that went down during a three-day period over the holiday weekend.
Sony chalked up the problem to heavy amounts of traffic, but one group of hackers took credit for the outage. On Saturday evening, a blog post was published from Sony vice president Catherine Jensen, explaining, “PlayStation Network and some other gaming services were attacked over the holidays with artificially high levels of traffic to disrupt connectivity and online gameplay.”
PlayStation – Last month’s Sony Pictures hack
Microsoft’s Xbox Live service was also affected by the major outage on Thursday. As of this writing, there is no evidence of a link to last month’s attack on Sony Pictures when a group of hackers brought down Sony Pictures to protest the controversial movie The Interview. The movie depicts the assassination of Kim Jong Ill.
The group of hackers who took credit for the outage calls itself Lizard Squad. One of the group’s Twitter accounts claimed the group has since stopped any attack they might have started against Sony and Microsoft, however, that does not mean someone else could adopt the Lizard Squad name and carry on the attacks. At the moment, it is still unclear what happened.
PlayStation – Lizard Squad looks for a new target
Lizard Squad appears to have a new target: Tor. One of the hacker groups sent the message, “To clarify, we are no longer attacking PSN or Xbox. We are testing our new Tor 0day.”
This isn’t the first time Sony Playstation Network was brought down. Three years ago, a group of hackers stole personal data from 77 million users on the Playstation Network. The Japanese tech giant locked 93,000 stolen user accounts, identifications and passwords. Sony sent notifications via email and password resets to the affected customers.
