Tweeted bomb threat sees plane carrying Sony president diverted

A tweeted bomb threat, allegedly from a group of hackers, saw a plane carrying Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley diverted and forced to land. The group, which are also believed to be behind Sunday’s PlayStation Network outage, tweeted at American Airlines saying that there were explosives aboard the flight.

Smedley confirmed that he was on the flight, but would not add much more detail:

Yes. My plane was diverted. Not going to discuss more than that. Justice will find these guys.

— John Smedley (@j_smedley) August 24, 2014

The nature of the group’s tweets suggest that the flight was definitely targeted because Smedley was on-board and that its aim was to cause him as much disruption as possible. Among the tweets mentioning him was one which showed video footage of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center on September 11 2001.

Amidst the PlayStation Network shutdown, the group appeared to claim with both ISIS and Anonymous, although in both cases it may well have been taking part in some pure, unadulterated trolling.

Although Smedley has little to do with the PlayStation Network himself, he was tweeting information about the outage, possibly marking him out as a target.

Image: Valerie Hukalo via Flickr.