FBI Reportedly Investigating PSN And Xbox Live Service Attacks
The recent DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on PlayStation Network and Xbox Live have not gone unnoticed by the FBI. The question is will American authorities be able to do anything about an underage teen in another county?
Sources with the Daily Dot state that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is “actively investigating” the attack and the Finnish teen who stated that he and two others were responsible for the attacks on PlayStation Network and Xbox Live. Note that this article will not name the group behind the attacks or the teen’s pseudonym because of their desire for attention.
The FBI agent who is investigating the attacks would not speak with the Daily Dot. The agent likely has a difficult road ahead, due to the fact that the attackers are located overseas. The attacker who did the interview is located in Finland, which gives citizens a right to refuse extradition plus “reserves the right to refuse extradition due to a suspect’s age, and can stipulate that Finnish citizens may not be prosecuted even if they are extradited.”
We’re aware that some of you are still having trouble; our teams are on the case! Latest status info here: http://t.co/99xfLNN0o8 ^QZ
— Xbox Support (1-5) (@XboxSupport) December 27, 2014
Without the cooperation of foreign governments, there is little hope that the FBI will be able to do much to bring the attackers to justice. It’s not unheard of, though, as a multi-national effort was responsible for bringing in the founders of Pirate Bay, the largest source of pirated movies and music via torrents at one time. One of the site’s co-founders was arrested near the Thailand-Laos border in November, while the sites servers in Sweden were raided and seized by police earlier this month.
There were also the 2011 hacking incidents with PlayStation Network and other services by LulzSec, an offshoot of Anonymous. That group and its members were located in the United States and United Kingdom.
The question is whether governments care enough to devote resources to ending DDoS attacks that inconvenience consumers. The PSN and Xbox Live attackers have rotated attacking various gaming and non-gaming services, but reach their height of irresponsibility when they called in a bomb threat in August to the American Airlines flight that Sony Online Entertainment CEO John Smedley was on. One of the attackers claims to have spent three months in a “maximum security prison” for the threat, but there’s no way to verify the claim.
PS4 users: If you are still having issues signing in to PSN today, please reboot the console and try again. — Ask PlayStation (@AskPlayStation) December 28, 2014
The attackers have seemingly moved on from inundating PlayStation Network and Xbox Live servers with more requests than they can handle. PSN in particular is still recovering from the DDoS attack, in addition to the flood of new consoles. Xbox Live recovered a little quicker, though servers still suffered issues over the post-Christmas weekend.
Do you think the FBI should spend more resources to go after those responsible for attacking Xbox Live and PlayStation Network? Sound off in the comments below.
[Images via Wikipedia, PlayStation, Xbox]
