A Twitter group calling themselves "the Lizard Squad" (with the Twitter handle, @LizardPatrol) has taken credit for the attack.
It has not been a good couple of weeks for Sony. Following a cyberattack on Sony Pictures at the end of November, numerous films from the studio’s catalog, including Annie and Fury, leaked onto the internet. The leak also included sensitive information, including actors’ salaries.
Now, Sony has been hit by another attack, this time against its online PlayStation store. According to a report from BBC News, the outage began on Sunday evening, with visitors to the website getting the message, “Page Not Found!”, followed by the mischievous missive “It’s not you. It’s the Internet’s fault.” Clearly, some hackers out there are enjoying this.
After the Sony Pictures hack, Sony was investigating the debacle with suspicions that North Korea had somehow been involved. North Korea had threatened retaliation against Sony a few months ago in connection to the film The Interview, which features a comedic storyline surrounding an assassination attempt on the life of North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un. Unsurprisingly, the North Korean government does not want the film, which stars Seth Rogen and James Franco, to be released to the public.
Sony officials have not yet proven North Korea’s involvement in the hack of its Hollywood site. However, now, the company will have something new to deal with. The PlayStation store was still down on Monday morning, hours after Sony said it was aware of the problem. This delay suggests that the Japan-based tech company is having difficulty getting the site back online.
A Twitter group calling themselves “the Lizard Squad” (with the Twitter handle, @LizardPatrol) has taken credit for the attack. The anonymous hacking group also took down the Xbox network last week, stopping Microsoft’s site with what is called a DDOS attack (or distributed denial of service).
The Lizard Squad has also been tied in the past to internet outages for EA Games and the game Destiny. With a website address based in Russia, the hackers have promised similar outages throughout the holiday season, which suggests that this latest attack against the PlayStation network is separate from the Sony Pictures website outage. For one thing, the Lizards only seem to target websites related to the gaming industry, and for another, they seem to like taking credit for their exploits.
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