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AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko
hack attack
Sony suffers another cyberattack as Playstation Network goes down
Users were unable to log in to the service for a number of hours as a hacker group overwhelmed it with high traffic.
THINGS HAVE GONE from bad to worse for Sony as its Playstation Network became the latest service to go down early this morning.
Users were unable to log in to the network for a number of hours and were greeted by a message which said “Page Not Found! It’s not you. It’s the internet’s fault.” The service is back up and running now.
A group called Lizard Squad is claiming to be responsible for the disruption. It has also claimed responsibility for the attacks on Xbox Live last week, which saw the service come under a DDoS – a distributed denial of service attack which overwhelms a site with high traffic and renders them unusable – as well as popular online games like Destiny and Call of Duty: Ghosts.
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The incident is one of a long line of attacks Sony has experienced in recent weeks. The company’s Hollywood studio, Sony Pictures Entertainment, was hacked into recently, causing five unreleased movies to be leaked online. Confidential information such as 47,000 Social Security numbers and personal information of actors and employees was also leaked.
It was believed that North Korea was behind the attack, but it denied involvement. It did describe it as a “righteous deed” and said it may have been carried out by its supporters as a way of protesting against a film featuring its leader Kim Jong-Un.
Sony was also the victim of another attack from Lizard Squad back in August when Playstation Network and Sony Entertainment Network was the subject of another DDoS.
On the same day, the President of Sony Online Entertainment, John Smedley, tweeted that his plane was diverted after the same group claimed there was a bomb on it.
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