PlayStation, Xbox Users Down by Possible “Hacker” Attack

Christmas day was not that pleasant for PlayStation and Xbox users as Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox Live gaming networks had experienced widespread problems on Christmas Day.

Report said a group of hackers claimed responsibility for an attack.

Because of the reported attack, hundreds of users took to Twitter to report problems with the systems.

Xbox and Sony reportedly acknowledged the glitch on their Twitter pages and said engineers were working to resolve it, but they did not cite the source of the problem. Officials said : “We are aware some users are unable to sign into Xbox Live. Our teams are working to resolve the issue. Visit xbox.com/support for status updates,” a Microsoft spokesman said. “We don’t share info on the root cause of specific issues.”

Reports added that system owners were able to play games offline, but couldn’t communicate with other players or make use of network functions.

Lizard squad

Hacker group Lizard Squad said it was “smacking” the two systems. The group also took responsibility for keeping each network down earlier this month on separate occasions.

On Thursday (December 25), the group asked for retweets in exchange for ending the problem, which could be a distributed denial of service attack. And that’s when hackers flood networks with illegitimate traffic, overwhelming the ability of the servers.

Report also said that the problem might be exacerbated by video gamers who received new systems for Christmas and were adding to the potential traffic on one of the busiest gaming days of the year.

Source: 9News Phils