The Phantom Squad threaten more attacks on Christmas
(Mirror Daily, United States) – It’s possible that hackers brought down Xbox Live and threaten PSN is next, but neither Microsoft or Sony has confirmed these attacks. Instead, the outage on Xbox Live on December 17th might have been just a fluke. However, the hacker group by the name of ‘Phantom Squad’ claim otherwise.
On Thursday, Xbox gamers might’ve found themselves unable to connect to the internet via their chosen consoles. According to a statement from Microsoft, they would’ve had trouble with game invites, notifications, purchasing new games, downloading updates, or even playing multiplayer games. Titles such as ‘Destiny’, and ‘Black Ops III’ might’ve been among them.
Microsoft offered their apologies via their support website and announced that they were working on the issue to fix it quickly for their players. However, on Friday, 3:35 AM IST, hacker group Phantom Squad claimed responsibility for the Xbox Live outage over Twitter, and threatened PlayStation Network (PSN) is next. It seems the holidays become that time of the year when hackers aim to prove a point.
A similar occurrence took place last year around the same time, when a hacker group, Lizard Squad, claimed they had caused the prolonged outages for both networks. The attacks kept happening, until the founder of cloud storage service MEGA, Kim Dotcom, got them to stop. Last year, Dotcom offered the hackers 3,000 premium accounts on his website. The attacks stopped.
With the recent outages this year, Dotcom even spoke out on Tweeter stating that Microsoft and Sony had one year to fix their security against hackers. The extended offline status for both servers should not be happening again. Regardless, they have. The Phantom Squad also spoke out again on Twitter a few hours after their first tweet, stating that PSN was down as well. However, at the time of their posting, Sony’s servers were up and running.
The attacks on Thursday consisted of DDoS-ing (distributed denial of service), which essentially means flooding the network with too many requests. The servers cannot handle them, and shut down.
The hacker group threatens that their biggest attack is yet to come. Phantom Squad claimed that they will be shutting down Xbox Live and PlayStation Network on Christmas, and will hold them down for one week. That’s guaranteed to piss off some players, with no multiplayer available on their time off work or school. That, and the winter sales they might be missing.
Why are they doing this and causing frustration for players? According to Phantom Squad, their point is to show that “cyber safety doesn’t exist”. They wish to underline the fact that neither Microsoft nor Sony place enough attention on the cyber security of their customers.
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