Petty DDos attack forces PSN servers to give up on life

Your PSN account was hacked earlier today, did you even realise? I woke up to the news that (again) my precious PSN account, of which I pay R59 per month was apparently subjected to a DDos attack. A “radical” group of hackers on twitter named Lizard Squad. A DDos attack, which is more of a minor nuisance than a true hack, is a large amount of requests sent into a server –the Sony PSN server in this case– which overloads it, causing it to fail. Also note that a DDos attack cannot harvest data, so our gaming accounts remain safe.

PSN is down for now, but what was Lizard Squads motive for this slight irritation?

PSN down

PSN is down for the moment

Worlds Factory discovered the “reason” for the DDos’ing. Shortly after the attack, Lizard Squad sent out this tweet:

PSN used to be a free multiplayer service but one day Sony flipped a switch and disallowed all multiplayer games unless users signed up for PlayStation Plus. Lizard Squad’s attack is based on the “poor” PSN service that we’re paying for. The group didn’t stop there. No, not content with ruining the fun for paid customers, it had to down an airplane as well.

Lizard Squad faked a bomb scare on a plane carrying Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley, forcing the plane to land.

They also took Vatican City offline, says this tweet from a few hours ago. Oddly enough, the Vatican City page is online. Unless they’re referring to the Pope’s twitter account.

In 2011, a truly devastating hack by Anonymous turned off PSN for 24 days, affecting a reported 77 million users. Hopefully, Sony’s bolstered its services since then, so the servers should be up soonest.

Steven Norris: grumpy curmudgeon
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