Sony hacks continue: PlayStation hit by Lizard Squad attack

By Alice MacGregor, CloserStill Media

Hacker group, Lizard Squad, has claimed responsibility for shutting down the PlayStation Network over Sunday night, the second large scale cyber-attack on the Sony system in recent weeks.

Users had been experiencing issues with log in overnight and into this morning, greeted by an error message reading “Page Not Found! It’s not you. It’s the Internet’s fault.”

PSN support acknowledged the downtime and confirmed that it had been investigating the issue. However, no details were shared as to the nature or cause of the issue.

“Thanks for your patience as we investigate,” the Japanese firm shared at midnight last night.
The company has now tweeted that the issue has been fixed: "If you had difficulties signing into PlayStation Network, give it a try now."

Although apparently unrelated, the outage comes just weeks after the much larger cyber-attack to the tech giant’s film studios Sony Pictures, which leaked confidential corporate information and unreleased movies.

An outfit calling themselves Guardians of Peace released the private data, including details on employees’ and actors’ salaries and addresses. Princess Beatrice was one of its victims, whose pay details and home address was forwarded to media firms across the U.S.

Speculations suggested that the Sony Pictures hack was linked to North Korea over its reported filmatic mocking of the national leader Kim Kong-Un. The country has denied engineering the attack, however the North Korean National Defence Commission released an official statement saying that the cyber-theft had been a “righteous deed.”

The group claiming to have taken down PSN today, Lizard Squad, first appeared earlier this year with another high-profile DDOS, or distributed denial of service attack, on Xbox Live and World of Warcraft in August.

Lizard Squad shared a link to a White Hose petition calling for the Obama Administration to “Stop the infamous DDOS hackers, and fake bomb threat callers, called Lizard Squad” – which currently counts 7,598 signatures.

The hacker collective claimed that this attack was just a taste and a ‘small dose’ of what was to come over the Christmas period.