PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Threatened With Christmas Day Shutdown
The PlayStation Network and Xbox Live online systems might be down on Christmas Day if hackers follow through with their threats to take down the networks. This would mean everyone who received a new Xbox One or PlayStation 4 for Christmas would not be able to play online right away.
A team of hackers called the Phantom Squad has threatened to take down the Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network by overloading the servers and causing them to crash, New York Daily News reported.
If the Phantom Squad is successful with their hack, it would be a similar attack to last year's attacks on the two networks by a team of hackers called the Lizard Squad.
The Phantom Squad claimed responsibility last week for taking Xbox Live down. Microsoft confirmed that Xbox Live was experiencing issues at around the same time that Phantom Squad tweeted that they took down the Xbox Live network, Game Zone reported.
This week, Reddit was taken offline for a brief amount of time. They were "under extreme load," which could have been caused by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. This is the same type of attack that Phantom Squad plans to use this Christmas on the video game networks and the same type of attack that the Lizard Squad used last year.
Phantom Squad answered the question probably on everyone's mind:
"I get asked a lot on why we do this? Why do we take down PSN and Xbox Live? Because cyber security does not exist," Phantom Squad tweeted.
The Phantom Squad Twitter account is now suspended.
If no improvements have been made to the two networks since the attack last year by Lizard Squad, another attack this Christmas could very well take them down again, which means no Call of Duty: Black Ops III online matches for millions.
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