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(Updated: 17:38pm)
JAPANESE ENTERTAINMENT GIANT Sony said Monday its online music and gaming sites came under a cyber attack by a hacker group that also claimed there were explosives on a plane carrying a senior company executive.
The company said a US commercial aircraft carrying the president of Sony had to be diverted after a warning online about the explosives.
“The PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network have been impacted by an attempt to overwhelm our network with artificially high traffic,” the company said on its PlayStation.Blog, adding that “no personal information has been accessed”.
The service was later restored with the company saying that there was “no evidence of any intrusion to the network and no evidence of any unauthorised access to users’ personal information.”
A spokeswoman for Sony in Tokyo said a person or group using the Twitter name @LizardSquad had claimed responsibility for the attack. Another hacker called FamedGod has taken credit for the Sony hack.
“Today we planted the ISIS flag on @Sony’s servers,” @LizardSquad tweeted said with a photo of a man carrying the Islamic State flag.
The feed also contained reference to a bomb on a plane.
Separately, John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment, tweeted that his plane was diverted as a result.
The American Airlines plane, bound for San Diego from Dallas, was redirected to Phoenix, according to the company.
More than 150 million accounts were registered with Sony Entertainment Network as of September last year, the company said. A scheduled maintenance was originally supposed to take place today, but has been postponed because of what happened.
A similar situation has occurred with Xbox Live with users having trouble logging in to the service. The problem has been resolved, although a separate problem involving the fantasy role-playing game Diablo III still exists.
Lizard squad posted a tweet earlier asking if people were having problems logging into Xbox Live and have implied it was responsible for the problems.
[Additional reporting by Quinton O'Reilly]
(Originally published at 9:54am)
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I didn’t know Isis were fans of online gaming
They are probably all call of duty players
Damn
Sure who is surprised?
Playstation network has bn asked so many times! Xbox online hasnt, u get what u pay for!
A lot of PS fanboys on this judging from all the red thumbs, but you’re dead right Mick! €50 a year for a far more stable and secure online experience is well worth it!
Dude is exactly the same price as Xbox Live. I should know I pay for both
You guys obviously don’t understand the nature of this attack and cannot see beyond the end if their Microsoft fanboy nose.
Internet fail !!!
It was a DDOS attack, trying to take down the servers. Very different to the phishing attack executed by LoLSec.
I pay for XBL and PSN that doesn’t mean I’m a Playstation or Microsoft fanboy, don’t rush to make assumptions
Colin I’m not talking about the nature of the attack, I’m talking about the company’s ineffective security measures. It’s not that MS is the only good thing, I game on a number of platforms, but if you think I’d let Sony look after my personal info you’d be greatly mistaken. MS has a great online service that millions of people have been happy to pay for for years, with that money being pumped back into the online service for proper development. Sony haven’t kept up and they pay for it in PR every time this happens.
Gareth do you have a PS4 or a PS3? to compare the experience vs Xbox?
Gareth, clearly there is only one fanboy in here.
As a longtime user of both, xbl has had its fair share of outages over the years. Also both systems require a 50 euro annual charge.
“I’m not talking about the nature of the attack, I’m talking about the company’s ineffective security measures.”
Gareth, in this case the nature of the attack has absolutely NO BEARING on their security measures.
Flooding a server with fake information and requests is doesn’t require anything but a bit of software and an IP address.
xbox has been attacked a few times over the last year or so…its just the media never report it. look into it and you will see it happened.
nothing online is safe from these attacks.
It’s happening right now. The same group are attacking xbl now.
Game over
Since finding out Sony provide components for so called precision bombing I will never knowingly buy a product off them again.
Now. Back to the X Box.
Yeah, because Microsoft are a bastion of high moral standards.
Steam.
EOM
“Welcome followers and supporters of FamedGod. Over the past 9 hours many are wondering why such events have occurred to the playstation network. Sony is a company that lacks the security which makes every user vulnerable to having their information leaked. Jailbreaks can access hidden and prohibited content now. Memory dumping can reveal the hidden servers which personal and main information is stored. Simple hex converting and decryption lead to a full DDoS on playstations main server data center. Please understand, I am here to show, that you as a corperate company are vulnerable. Sony You just launched a new system on a new network but it all leads to the same server. How more vulnerable could you make your network? Take advise from microsoft and their ways of security. They know what they’re doing and have the security to prevent most attacks. This took little to no effort to preform such an attack. The funny thing is that you still allow people to access the network on these jailbroken consoles. If you really wanted to remove them from your network entirely, you would drop the current network and forge all the information to a new and well secured network making it impracticle to mod the next. The fact you cant even stop the sign in from modded firmware is ridiculous. You apparently, didnt solve a thing when you went down for a month. I hope you think twice next time. Thank you and Follow me on twitter at famedgod.”
If accurate, Sony could do with putting in a bit of work.
From @lizardsquad:
“Sony, yet another large company, but they aren’t spending the waves of cash they obtain on their customers’ PSN service. End the greed.”
The PlayStation network wasn’t hacked per se. What actually happened was the servers were over run. No ones information etc was targeted. They instead flooded the servers and clogged it all up, just made it a bit messy. The term hacked should not just be thrown around, there is a difference between what these guys did and proper hacking.
I would almost bet that this was done by some little kid who hates PlayStation or loves Xbox and used the IS stuff to try get attention. This type of ‘attack’ happens often and easily to many many other services.
Oh Charlie. Oh Charlie Charlie Charlie. Stay off the Internet.
Hackers? Christ almighty. The Sony Entertainment Network wasn’t hacked.
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