If you tried to play games online last year during the holidays you may still remember what you went through. It was an excruciating few days for both Microsoft and Sony as Xbox Live and PlayStation Network were hit by DDoS attacks which took the networks down for a couple of days. That particular attack was carried out by a group that calls itself Lizard Squad, it hasn’t made a similar threat this year as yet, but the unrelated Phantom Squad has.
Phantom Squad has been getting the message out via Twitter, that it’s going to shut down Xbox Live and PSN this year on Christmas, and that’s it’s going to keep both networks down for one week straight.
It’s also looking to go after online networks of GTA 5, Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic. The group will most likely use a distributed denial of service attack on these networks which basically puts extreme load on the servers causing them to crash.
Kim Dotcom, the controversial internet mogul, was instrumental in ending Lizard Squad’s attack last year when he brokered a deal and offered them 3,000 accounts to Mega, his encrypted upload service. When the threats for this year surfaced he pointed out that people will not be pleased with Sony and Microsoft if their networks go down this year because they have had 12 months to upgrade their networks to better combat such attacks.
It goes without saying that Microsoft and Sony will already be anticipating copycat attacks this time around at Christmas since last year’s fiasco managed to get major headlines, let’s just hope they’re ready for it.
Filed in . Read more about Microsoft, Playstation Network, Sony and Xbox Live.