Pierluigi Paganini in Cyber Crime

Sony PlayStation network brought down by a DDoS attack and President’s Plane diverted

The PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network have been hit by a major DDoS Attack, hackers also claimed to have diverted SOE President’s Plane.

A large scale DDoS attack is currently targeting the PlayStation Network which is experiencing mass outages for North American users.

“Like other major networks around the world, the PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network have been impacted by an attempt to overwhelm our network with artificially high traffic.” announced Sony.

The group of hackers Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack. The Hackers of the Lizard Squad group have hit a range of gaming services including Battle.net, League of Legends, Sony Online Entertainment titles, PSN and others.

“UPDATE: The PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network are back online and people can now enjoy the services on their PlayStation devices. The networks were taken offline due to a distributed denial of service attack. We have seen no evidence of any intrusion to the network and no evidence of any unauthorized access to users’ personal information.” states the update issued by Sony.

The company confirmed that users’ personal details haven’t been leaked in the attack, its customers were not able to access the gaming platform in various locales for more than ten hours since the DDoS attack began.

There is also a curious episode which occurred in conjunction with the DDoS attack, the plane in which Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley was traveling was diverted to Phoenix, the authorities have inspected the cargo searching for explosives while the Lizard Squad group was claiming on Twitter that the flight had explosives on board.

The group of hackers also tweeted their support for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, the Jihadist militant group operating in Iraq and Syria.

Below some of the Tweets sent by the president of Sony Online Entertainment which confirmed the DDoS Attack:

In time I’m writing the DDoS attacks seems to be under control, a Twitter account claiming to be responsible for the hacks is announcing an attack on Xbox Live network.

According to a Sony representative speaking to ShackNews, the law enforcement is already investigating on the attack.

The Sony Entertainment Network President Smedley also provided a link to a map showing where the DDoS attack had hit.

Stay Tuned for further details.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Sony, DDoS Attack)

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Pierluigi Paganini: Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.