Oh joy, another group of “hacker” idiots have revealed plans to take-down Xbox Live and PlayStation Network servers once again.
Gamers remember Christmas 2014 not for the selection of fantastic games and new consoles
under the tree, but for the frustration felt when an idiot “hacker” group claimed responsibility for taking down Xbox Live and PlayStation Network servers.
It’s an idiotic thing to do which causes nothing more than frustration from millions of people who just want to enjoy the holidays and the gifts they’ve received from friends and loved ones. Unfortunately, there’s just a number of tools out there who think that causing this frustration is a fantastic use of their time this holiday season.
The group “Phantom Squad” – not exactly a far-off departure from last year’s idiots who called themselves “Lizard Squad” – have warned of a week-long outage around the Christmas period following a brief bit of downtime for Xbox Live earlier this week.
Apparently the group were responsible for some down time this week, though failed to actually provide proof other than a series of tweets. According to the idiot squad, the reason for the down time is because the the two companies have millions of dollars which they aren’t using for security.
The only issue is, the down time isn’t due to a security flaw, but instead an issue with not being able to deal with the millions of packets of data these part-time “hackers” are sending over to the game services servers. Of course, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how to overload a server. In fact, “Lizard Squad” even tried selling their own DDoS tool for about $10 earlier this year, before being quickly taken down.
Yes, this is an issue which falls on Sony and Microsoft, for not having enough DDoS protection, but it’s hardly a security flaw. If the Idiot Squad decide to go ahead with the “hack”, chances are the online game servers will be down for some time, unless Sony and Microsoft can put together a series of servers in various different locations, ready to take on the additional load – though that’s a pretty expensive response to a threat made by another group likely made up of teenagers.
The Phantom Squad’s Twitter account has since been disabled.