Hackers Attack Gaming Networks

Over the weekend, Several major gaming networks were taken offline by a group of hackers known as Lizard Squad.

If you were trying to use the PlayStation Network and Blizzard’s Battle.net, you had to find other means of entertainment on Sunday.

Xbox Live also experienced some limited connectivity issues, and on Friday there were also reports of trouble with League of Legends and ArenaNet, thanks to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

Lizard Squad also suggested that it had hit Xbox Live. In a Monday morning update, the Xbox Live status page said it was having connectivity issues with Party Chat for Diablo III on Xbox One and Xbox 360, and server unavailability on Xbox One.

Blizzard, meanwhile, said on Sunday that it too was having server issues. Late last night, the team tweeted that “services appear to be stabilizing.”

Sony acknowledged the outage on its blog yesterday, but said in a recent update that “the PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network are back online and people can now enjoy the services on their PlayStation devices.”

“The networks were taken offline due to a distributed denial of service attack. We have seen no evidence of any intrusion to the network and no evidence of any unauthorized access to users’ personal information,” Sony said.

In 2011, Sony’s network was hit with a massive outage that did include the loss of personal information. It lasted almost a month and attracted the attention of Congress. In July, Sony agreed to drop its appeal and pay a £250,000 ($414,000) fine handed down by the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

Source: PC Mag