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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