After the brief unavailability of the PlayStation Network service for some Playstation gamers, a hacker group called Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility for the outage. With visitors to the site being greeted by a message that read “Page not found! It’s not you. It’s the internet’s fault”, and Lizard Squad sending out a tweet that read “PSN Login #offline #LizardSquad” Sony scrambled to respond and get the service up and running again.
In a statement before the PSN service was restored, Sony had responded to the suspected cyber attack on Sunday by saying “We are aware of the issues some users are experiencing, and are working to address them,” – and that they did, the service was back up by 9.am on Monday. But with the outage coming hot on the heels of the hacking and theft of over 100 terabytes of data from Sony Pictures, the issue of privacy and security on the internet is still a major concern.
No information was available from Sony on whether any of the consumer information had been compromised by the attack. Lizard Squad has targeted Sony’s PlayStation network before, as recently as August, the group aimed denial of service attacks at the PSN service and made bomb threats at a Sony executive.
In 2011, the PlayStation Network service suffered an outage over several days with personal details of more than 70 million users being stolen. At the time Sony was punished for its handling of the attack, and fined a quarter of a million Pounds by the UK’s data protection watchdog. With Sony celebrating 20 years of PlayStation the timing of these attacks could not be worse, let’s hope this time nothing has been leaked!
[…] from both disc copies and digital downloads. While the PS4 continues to surpass all expectations, Sony’s PlayStation Network service has been shut down in attacks by hackers a few times, the most recent time being over Christmas and Boxing day when some users didn’t […]