It seems like hackers want to spoil the fun for everybody over Christmas, the holiday that many look forward to just because they have time off to play games for as long as they want, it all went horribly wrong last year when Xbox Live and PSN were taken down by a group called Lizard Squad. Now there’s a group going by the name SkidNP threatening to take down Minecraft and Steam servers over Christmas, less than a week from today.
The threat follows one made by another group called Phantom Squad which claimed that it will hit PlayStation Network and Xbox Live with a distributed denial of service attack over Christmas, essentially overloading servers so they crash and nobody is able to play online.
SkidNP says that they’ll be focusing their attention towards Minecraft and Steam servers, adding that they’re not doing this to not allow people to play online during the holidays, but because they want companies like Sony, Microsoft and Valve to do more to protect their networks against such attacks.
“We will be hitting them because we are trying to make services like them [prevent] these sort of attacks, so they get stronger,” a member of the group tells Neowin, adding “Anyone with a $5 booter can take down Xbox if they have the right IP.” That’s not different from how Phantom Squad justified its plan to attack Xbox One and PlayStation Network this Christmas, saying that they’re taking down the networks because “cyber security does not exist.”
All eyes will now be on the companies that operate these networks and the safeguards they have put in place to ensure that players are not troubled with network outages on the one day of the year that they’re most looking forward to play. If that does happen they can expect to be on the receiving end of some very harsh words.
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