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Playstation Network Attacked Along With Battle.Net, Services Brought Down [Updated]

By Scott Grill
Published on: 02:43 PST, Aug 24, 2014

Sony’s PlayStation Network came under a DDoS attack early Sunday morning along with other gaming services like Blizzard’s Battle.net and League of Legends. The latter are back up and running as of the time of this article, but PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3 owners are still affected by the attack on PSN servers.

Sony originally planned to bring the PlayStation Network down for maintenance on Monday. This current outage is not part of that.

A group or individual calling itself the “Lizard Squad” is taking credit for the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. It’s not fair to call the group hackers since systems are not being breached as an attempt to steal data. Instead, they are simply flooding the servers for various online services with more traffic than they can handle.

The outages started late Saturday evening Eastern Time with an attack on AT&T before the Lizard Squad moved on to League of Legends. They started by harassing a female Twitch streamer named Kaceytron and initiating DDoS attacks on games they were playing and followed their attacks as she moved from Hearthstone to Diablo III and eventually attacked Comcast to cause her to go offline.

They then begin hitting other Twitch streamers, and the games they were playing such as Path of Exile and brought down all of Battle.net.

For whatever reason, they got bored with attacking those services and turned to attacking PlayStation Network. It appears that Sony was able to get the PSN servers up for a while before stating, “We’re attempting to slam Sony back into the ground.”

This is the message in the current pinned Tweet by Lizard Squad.

The DDoS attack led to condemnation of Lizard Squad from people affected by the various services being brought down.

At the time this article was posted, I’ve been unable to log into PSN through my PlayStation 4 or PlayStation 3. If you’re having problems starting a game to even play a single-player mode, you can disconnect the console from your home network so that you don’t get stuck trying to connect to PSN.

How has the DDoS attack on PlayStation Network, Battle.net and other games affected you? Sound off in the comments below.

Update: As of 1:25 p.m. EDT, PSN is still down. The official Playstation Twitter Support account posted the following message.

Meanwhile, to show just how bizarre this attack has become, Lizard Squad is claiming that it will not cease the attack on the Playstation Network until the bombing of ISIS, the group terrorizing Iraq by beheading and crucifying those that don’t conform to their brand of Islamic ideology, stops.

Update 2: In an even more bizarre move, Lizard Squad is Tweeting out fake bomb threats to American Airlines in an attempt to get John Smedley’s plane grounded. Smedley is the President of Sony Online Entertainment.

This individual or individuals behind Lizard Squad must not be aware that this this can get them arrested. CNN reported on a Dutch teen arrested in April for Tweeting a fake bomb threat to American Airlines.

Update 3: SOE President John Smedley’s flight that was bound for San Diego has been redirected to Phoenix and Lizard Squad is bragging about it with video from the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. This is nothing short of unbelievable.

Update 4: In another bizarre twist, it may not be Lizard Squad doing the DDoS attack on PSN servers. Another individual called FamedGod claims that they are behind the attacks on Sony.

They ominously say they are setting their sights on Xbox next.

Update 5: Smedley gave the following update after his America Airlines flight was diverted to Phoenix and searched.

Update 6: Playstation Support just posted the following update regarding the Playstation Network.

[Image via PlayStation Network (edited)]

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