Sony PlayStation Network Taken Down By DDoS Attack

It’s been a bad weekend for Sony Playstation. The entire PlayStation Network was down much of the day after a dedicated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack by online attackers, which left the network inaccessible to users.

It's possible that EVE Online and Guild Wars 2 have also been hit by the attackers. Developers on the EVE Online forums have announced DDoS issues, and many users on the Guild Wars 2 forums have been reporting login issues.

Sony’s PlayStation Network is an online service that connects PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 video game consoles to the Internet and to over-the-top video services such as Netflix.

What’s weird about this attack is that it also includes a security threat against the American Airlines plane in which the President of Sony Online Entertainment, John Smedley, was traveling today. The aircraft along with a full load of passengers was diverted to Phoenix due to a bomb threat.

WHO BRING DOWN SONY PLAYSTATION NETWORK?
Two separate hacker groups, Lizard Squad and Famed God, took to social media, Twitter and YouTube, respectively, to claim responsibility for the DDoS attack on the entertainment company, which, according to Sony, inflicted an "artificially high" amount of traffic on the PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network.

EXPLOSIVES IN AIRPLANE

At 1.30 p.m. ET, the Lizard Squad took group posted on Twitter that an American Airlines plane, with Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley on board, had explosives, which caused the grounding of American Airlines flight 362 by way of a bomb threat on Twitter. The flight has since been sent safely on its way.

@LizardSquad Today we planted the ISIS flag on @Sony's servers #ISIS #jihad - 11:03 PM - 24 Aug 2014

Smedley later confirmed that his flight flying from Dallas to San Francisco was being diverted to Phoenix, Arizona. "Flight diverted to Phoenix for security reasons," he said. "Something about the security and our cargo. Sitting on Tarmack."

According to the company, no personal information had been leaked in the attack, but the rolling outage persists in various places, some ten hours or more after the attack began.