Hackers Announce Plan To Ruin Christmas By Disrupting Online Gaming Servers

Remember when PSN and Xbox Live went down previous year when Lizard Squad went on a rampage.

For the past week, online gaming services Xbox Live and PlayStation Network have been receiving threats from a hacker group.

According to the Reddit Status website, the problem was due to some of its databases coming “under extreme load”, which could have been caused by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack – the tool Phantom Squad is promising to use against PSN and Xbox Live servers at Christmas.

What do you think about Phantom Squad and their declarations of war upon PSN and Xbox Live? The group attacked these online game services and made them inaccessible for players around the world. Only time will tell if this planned DDOS will be successful but hopefully both Sony and Microsoft have learnt from a year ago and will be able to thwart any attempts levied at it this time around.

When the Lizard Squad attacks commenced past year they only ceased when internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom promised the Lizard Squad 3,000 encrypted Mega upload accounts. None of the companies responsible for managing these online networks and games have confirmed the DDoS attacks, but it’s worth noting that Microsoft at least acknowledged issues with Xbox LIVE around the time Phantom Squad claimed responsibility. To prove its strength, Phantom Squad also released a few videos to prove their hacking activities.

Speaking of which, Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony have all got together and discussed ways to prevent something like last year’s Christmas DDOS from happening again, so maybe there will be better security measures in place this time.

Besides claiming to have taken Reddit offline briefly, the group also claims to have attacked servers running GTA 5 and Black Ops 3, as well as taking Xbox Live and PSN offline for brief spells. No official statement is released from any of the console manufacturers.