Interesting Christmas here, and across much of the country. DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks by a hacker group called Lizard Squad have made Xbox Live and the Playstation Network unavailable to a large part of the country all day. And with Christmas being a popular time to exchange new gaming consoles and video games, there has been widespread frustration and unhappiness. Not to mention those who would have been gaming anyway just because it was a day off.
My grandson and I just started playing Destiny together a few days ago (first time he’s been allowed to play a first person shooter) and hoped to play some more this evening. Nope. We both need access to Xbox Live to do so. The service did come back up for a short time around 7 pm and I was able to rent and watch “The Interview,” but by the time the movie was over, the service was down again.
The Lizard Squad is suspected of helping North Korea hack Sony, and some sources think today’s outages are the “Christmas surprise” that North Korea mentioned earlier this week. Earlier this month, LS promised Christmas attacks and has been bragging about the outages since they began yesterday.
I suppose that makes the day a wash for North Korea and the hackers. “The Interview” was released, but much of the nation’s gaming was taken down. Hope this gets sorted out soon. I got two new games for Christmas.
And yes, Anonymous has spoken up as the good guys. In early December, after some preliminary Lizard Squad attacks on Playstation Network and Xbox Live, they issued this warning:
It would be interesting to see how this all works out — if only they weren’t messing with my gaming.