On Christmas Day, both Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Sony’s PlayStation were hacked, causing millions unable to play their games online on their holiday.
There are 48 million subscribers to Microsoft’s system for the Xbox and more than double that for the PlayStation system, which has some 110 million.
Lizard Squad, best known among gamers as a hacking group which despised and revered for their seemingly random assaults on the video game world, claimed responsibility for the attack which left millions of users struggling to access their accounts for hours.
To make the most of the Xbox and PlayStation consoles, players have to connect to the internet in order to reach the console manufacturers computer servers. And this outage has stopped people accessing the core services which prevented them from registering a new account, connecting with other people to play the same game and connecting to entertainment channels via the console.
Joseph Rose, a journalist of Oregon Live states several facts relating to this cyber-attack. It seems like this hacking is well plan since Lizard Squad has started on Wednesday night and continued into Thursday, which the hacking group posted on twitter saying:
“Jingle bells jingle bells Xbox got ran,” the group wrote on Twitter Thursday, adding a similar line about Sony. “Oh my fun it is to troll of you morons … hey!”
The reason why Lizard Squad go after the gaming servers could be that Christmas is the biggest gaming day of the year, and it is also the same The Interview released. PlayStation is owned by Sony, and Sony was attacked by hackers to break into the company’s servers and released a trove of confidential information. Microsoft and Sony have both started streaming “The Interview” on its gaming consoles for a $6 rental price.
Currently, Microsoft Corp’s Xbox Live was back up. However, PlayStation Network remained offline.
Source: OregonLive, BBC