(Updated: 17:38pm)
JAPANESE ENTERTAINMENT GIANT Sony said Monday its online music and gaming sites came under a cyber attack by a hacker group that also claimed there were explosives on a plane carrying a senior company executive.
The company said a US commercial aircraft carrying the president of Sony had to be diverted after a warning online about the explosives.
“The PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network have been impacted by an attempt to overwhelm our network with artificially high traffic,” the company said on its PlayStation.Blog, adding that “no personal information has been accessed”.
The service was later restored with the company saying that there was “no evidence of any intrusion to the network and no evidence of any unauthorised access to users’ personal information.”
A spokeswoman for Sony in Tokyo said a person or group using the Twitter name @LizardSquad had claimed responsibility for the attack. Another hacker called FamedGod has taken credit for the Sony hack.
“Today we planted the ISIS flag on @Sony’s servers,” @LizardSquad tweeted said with a photo of a man carrying the Islamic State flag.
The feed also contained reference to a bomb on a plane.
Separately, John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment, tweeted that his plane was diverted as a result.
The American Airlines plane, bound for San Diego from Dallas, was redirected to Phoenix, according to the company.
More than 150 million accounts were registered with Sony Entertainment Network as of September last year, the company said. A scheduled maintenance was originally supposed to take place today, but has been postponed because of what happened.
A similar situation has occurred with Xbox Live with users having trouble logging in to the service. The problem has been resolved, although a separate problem involving the fantasy role-playing game Diablo III still exists.
Lizard squad posted a tweet earlier asking if people were having problems logging into Xbox Live and have implied it was responsible for the problems.
[Additional reporting by Quinton O'Reilly]
(Originally published at 9:54am)
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