Hackers' Attack on Playstation and Xbox Live Trends in U.K

XboxLivePSN 

Thousands of people reported Christmas Day problems on the Xbox Live and Playstation gaming networks, as a band of hackers took gleeful credit. The networks, which allow users of the popular consoles to play the video games with a wider online community, first crashed on Wednesday evening and the problems persisted into Christmas Day, enraging many users — but especially those powering-up new machines from Santa Claus.
Hours after Microsoft’s Xbox Live went down Wednesday, Sony’s PlayStation Network went down, too. These are two giant networks that console gamers access to play their games online. It's especially bad timing since a lot of people are probably getting new PlayStations and Xboxes for Christmas.

A hacker group called Lizard Squad took to Twitter to claim responsibility for the attacks, tweeting, “Microsoft will receive a wonderful Christmas present from us,” around the same time user reports began surfacing online. Lizard Squad has become a notable hacker group, due to its ability to take down large gaming networks using Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. DDoS attacks work by flooding a targeted service with as much traffic as possible, until the server is overloaded and crashes, taking the service offline.

Talk to any avid gamer these days and they’ll tell you about Lizard Squad. This particular hacking group has been waging seemingly random attacks on the video game industry since the summer. They say they are doing it just because they can, and are both despised and revered by hundreds of thousands of people because of it. Lizard Squad even sells T-shirts. Welcome to the 21st century, where hacking and other forms of digital disruption are entertainment, and hacker groups have fandoms.
Lizard Squad has been tweeting about these outages incessantly, boosting its number of Twitter followers by promising to restore the downed game networks if people favorite and retweet their messages a certain number of times. The current outage is affecting core services and a few select apps for gamers that use the Xbox 360, including IGN, Maxim, and MLG.TV.





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