Sony and Microsoft fight … the Lizard Squad
Starting on Christmas Eve, Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Sony’s PlayStation Network suffered outages that lasted through Christmas Day and beyond. By the morning of the 26th, XBox was said to be back online, but judging by the continued grumpiness on Twitter, PlayStation Network was still not working.
A group called Lizard Squad posted messages on Twitter, taking responsibility.
Lizard Squad, a group of so-called “black hat” hackers, has a history of attacking gaming networks. In those earlier attacks, Lizard Squad used what’s called D-Dos or Distributed Denial of Service attacks, in which hackers send a bunch of essentially fake online traffic to a website or a service and bring it down by overwhelming the system.
No one is saying that these hacks are related to the earlier attacks on Sony Pictures that President Obama has blamed on North Korea. But it does come at an inopportune moment for the company.
Of the many tweets on the subject, perhaps the most amusing come from someone with a fake Kim Jong-Un account. Starts by quoting a headline from the tech blog Gizmodo: “Xbox Live and PSN are still messed up” and ends: “It wasn’t me, PEACE”
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