One would think that hackers would recede in their lairs for the holidays but the reality is different. A notorious group which goes by the moniker Lizard Squad is taking credit for the attack on PlayStation Network and Xbox Live that took place on Christmas Eve. This group has been involved in similar attacks in the past as well, which basically overloads the servers intentionally by sending bogus traffic.
This sort of an attack is called DDoS and is actually pretty common. Online gaming networks like PSN and Xbox Live have been hit with DDoS attacks in the past as well, but the latest will have inconvenienced a lot of gamers who settled down to enjoy some online gaming in their holidays, only to find that the network wasn’t functioning as it should.
The Lizard Squad group took to Twitter to not only boast that it had downed PlayStation Network and Xbox Live, but to solicit retweets from people if they wanted the DDoS attacks to stop. The service issue was acknowledged by Sony’s AskPlayStation account on Twitter but it didn’t specify if the problems were due to a DDoS attack.
Lizard Squad had actually posted a threat last week that it would target these networks over Christmas Eve, the group followed through. For now both networks are back online but Xbox Live is showing limited services for some apps like IGN and Maxim.