Phantom Squad threatens to take down Xbox Live, PSN servers during the holiday season starting Christmas
Last year this time the infamous band of hacker, Lizard Squad had promised to take down both Xbox Live and PSN servers down during the busy Christmas holidays. Surprisingly they successfully took down both the gaming servers and caused misery to millions of gamers during the holiday season.
This year another hacking group Phantom Squad has promise to do something similar and spoil gamers holidays. They announced on Twitter that they will take down the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live for Christmas. For the past week, hacker group Phantom Squad has been issuing threats to knock out both systems’ online services with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
“We are going to shut down Xbox live and PSN this year on Christmas. And we are going to keep them down for one week straight #DramaAlert”
The two companies are not the only network servers that Phantom Squad has threatened. The group also promises to disrupt the online fun that might happen over the holidays in “Grand Theft Auto V,” “Star Wars: The Old Republic,” and “Call of Duty: Black Ops 3.” They claim to have already started making attacks on these networks. It says that it is going to carry out the attacks “because cybersecurity does not exist.”
Similarly, last year, Lizard Squad, a hacker group had shut down Xbox Live and PSN on Christmas and Christmas Eve. At the time Lizard Squad claimed they had carried out the attack to force companies to upgrade the security on their networks. However, the Phantom Squad claim that they are not affiliated with Lizard Squad at all.
Last year, Internet mogul Kim Dotcom had ended the attacks carried out by Lizard Squad by brokering a deal, in which he offered them 3,000 accounts on his encrypted upload service Mega. When threats of the new attack surfaced, he warned Sony and Microsoft on Twitter about having their act together this year:
“Warning @Sony & @Microsoft. You had 1 year to upgrade your networks. If Lizard Squad takes down PSN & XBOX this Xmas, we’ll be pissed! RT!”
Phantom Squad have also claimed to be responsible for the outage Reddit experienced earlier this week. The website did indeed go down for a short period of time. Reddit’s website status report suggests that the website database was under extreme load. However, the company has not verified the validity of that claim till now.
This year Christmas may end up being dark for gamers, if the hackers are successful in their war against Xbox Live and PSN. We hope that Sony and Microsoft will take necessary measures to prevent this from happening. No official statement has been released yet from any of the game console manufacturers.
It seems that they’ll be busy with another bunch of script kiddies this year. I don’t know why, but I just feel like they’re only capable of simple DOS attacks and nothing else more sophisticated, like grabbing information, then simply selling it on the black market, like some of the more malicious ones tend to do.