Sony works for 3rd day to recover from PlayStation network attack

Sony Corp worked for a third day on Saturday to restore services to its PlayStation video gaming network after disruptions that a hacker group said it caused in a Christmas Day attack. It was unclear how many of the more than 50 million PSN users around the globe were affected. Sony representatives could not be reached for comment and customer response was mixed to requests from its Twitter support account to be patient. A hacker activist group known as Lizard Squad said it was responsible for the PSN outage as disruptions on Microsoft’s Xbox network were quickly fixed.

We know you’re trying your best. We all hate the hackers that did this.

a PSN customer via Twitter

Signs of trouble emerged earlier this month when someone using a Lizard Squad account on Twitter began threatening to disrupt gaming services on Christmas — and then boasted of causing the outages on Thursday. A person or group using the same name on Twitter took credit last August for similar attacks in which hackers overwhelmed company servers with a flood of Internet traffic, disrupting the online gaming networks operated by Sony, Riot Games and other companies. The same Twitter account was also used in August to make an apparently false report that a bomb was on an airliner carrying a Sony executive. So far, there’s no specific evidence to link these episodes with last month’s malware attacks on Sony’s movie division. The current episode doesn’t appear to have exposed any corporate or customer data. But one expert said Friday that the Lizard Squad group is capable of serious disruption.

They’re well-practiced and, from what I see, they’ve got the capability to take down a lot of things.

Dan Holden, director of security research for Arbor Networks, a cyber-defense company based in Burlington, Massachusetts

Asia-Pacific