Pierluigi Paganini
December 24, 2016
Christmas time is a critical period for the gaming industry that is threatened by hackers that want to paralyze their services with massive attacks.
Yesterday I reported the DDoS attacks launched by Phantom Squad and PoodleCorp against Steam and Origin Servers, and unfortunately they are not alone.
Hackers threaten to take down Xbox Live and PSN on Christmas Day, and we know that someone already done is in the same period two years ago when Lizard Squad hackers took down the networks of Sony PSN and Microsoft XBox Live.
Which are the risks for gamers?
People that will buy or will receive new PlayStation and XBoxe consoles will not be able to log into the online gaming console, it will be not possible to download and buy online games, neither play online with other gamers.
Now a hacker group that called itself R.I.U. Star Patrol (StarPatrolling) posted a video on YouTube, announcing that they will take down Xbox Live and PSN on Christmas Day with a massive DDoS attack.
The threat is considered credible, the same group managed to take down Tumblr this week for two hours.
“We do it because we can,” the group said. “We have not been paid a single dollar for what we do.”
@mashable We are claiming responsibility for the Tumblr outage #StarPatrol
— R.I.U. Star Patrol (@StarPatrolling) 21 dicembre 2016
Just after the attack, the hackers released an interview with Mashable and motivated the attack with the following statement.
“There is no sinister motive,” they replied when asked for the cause of the attacks.”It’s all for light hearted fun.”
Via DM, the group told Mashable the DDoS attack wasn’t meant to harm anyone.
Xbox Live and PSN networks were both target in the past by hacker so they worked to improve their defense anyway recent attacks powered by the Mirai botnet demonstrated that it could be quite simple for hackers to take down major web services.
