Sony, Microsoft need to stand up to Lizard Squad

GGG writes about the recent XBL and PSN outages: "There doesn't appear to be an end in sight so for the time being, be prepared to have PSN and Xbox Live go down randomly for you. Lizard Squad appears to attack popular gaming services at least once or twice per month, with no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Until then, Microsoft and Sony need to try to look as strong as possible against this threat. Like a scene from a movie where an individual is getting the crap beaten out of them in an impossible fight telling their attacker "fuck off" before finally being knocked unconscious. Even if there is nothing they can do, they can at least stand up for themselves."

[qwerty676]

what can they do?

[DarkAstronaut]

It's time to get these kids parents involved.

[Letthewookiewin]

I think it's a group of very lonely 30 year olds. But standing by what you said yes, I'm sure we could get their parents involved.

[Gothdom]

http://www.lizardsquad.info...

[nitus10]

I think you have to find the culprits first before you can make a call like that.

[BABY-JEDI]

But what if they are badly made test tube babies?

[ShinMaster]

What was surprising to me was that PSN is currently more secure than XBL as of recently.

""The easier game network to take down was Microsoft’s Xbox Live. Sony had apparently upgraded its security recently, which took “a bit of time to work around,” but Microsoft had “almost nothing” in terms of security.""
-Lizard Squad

http://www.businessinsider....

Seems like PSN isn't as bad as some people want it to be.

[OB1Biker]

Not sure what they can do but everyone should Stop talking about them its just what they want

[Lord_Sloth]

This TOTALLY would have stopped Hitler, too.

[lawgone]

Lotd_Sloth...are you kidding me? Hitler?

[Gaming247allday]

Sadly, it's quite difficult to defend your network from traffic. I mean, more servers would always be an option, but that's probably just a sticking plaster on a gaping wound. if they could do something, i'm sure they would

[GameSpawn]

More servers do not work against DDOS attacks, they'll just increase the number of machines flooding garbage to the servers. The only proven way to stop DDOS attacks is for ISPs and internet gateways to detect them before they reach their destination (another virtually impossible task especially with distributed attacks, the 1st "D" in DDOS).

They only way to nip DDOS in the bud 100% is to give up the very thing that the internet was founded upon...neutrality & openness. If we allow ISPs to monitor traffic much more closely, DDOS attacks can be detected EXTREMELY early on and the "flood" of bad packets can be dumped early on in the internet "nodes" and the perpetrators (infected machines - DDOS is not done by one individual's machine or a set of individuals, but "ghosts", infected computers with "sleeper" trojans that wait for commands from a remote source) can be temporarily blacklisted and blocked from ALL internet traffic. This does mean giving up a big freedom though and that is the freedom of information through the internet as well as some layers of anonymity.

I wish that ISPs weren't so greedy as if they were truly upstanding and cared for the freedom of information to all that the internet provides they could implement a system such as the one mentioned with the trust that it would never be used for nefarious purposes (such as personal [monetary] gain or government strong-arming). Unfortunately we live in a greedy, hateful world because if people weren't greedy and hateful we wouldn't even need systems like this in the first place. It's really a catch-22 the more you think about it.

[Ozmoses]

Is anyone else experiencing Malware issues popping up when trying to click the link provided that takes you to the actual article??? (I'm not just talking this article, but every article on N4G has been doing this since about mid afternoon EST time.)

I can't read any articles, I can see the comments and post comments but clicking to the link provided always results in a malware warning from the browser. It's really strange.

[ab5olut10n]

Getting the same thing, on a macbook

[Muzikguy]

I keep getting redirected to the App Store on my phone and it's frustrating. Half the time I can't even read anyrhing. Been going on a few days now

[nosferatuzodd]

me too this is crazy i think something sinister is behind these attacks

[Igniter]

Norton is reporting that these are attack pages.

[tmh3593]

http://www.lizardsquad.info...

this

[KingWookiee]

Thats pretty legit... but they tried to stop them before so lets see if this does anything

[THC CELL]

This would ruin cloud gaming. Why they need to stop it now xbox and sony teaming up will be a start.

These guys should be helping track iss not attacking us geeks we are not terrorist

[lawgone]

They are not sophisticated enough to help track anything. They're mostly kids doing DDoS because it's easy and they are bored and need attention. It's sad really. They don't get how seriously they can get into trouble. They think when the cops come they can just say "it was a joke" and it will all go away. They're in for a rude awakening.

[Aceman18]

What do these losers have against gamers? Why can't they go bother other people or businesses?

[Bansai]

oh the irony of this situation, owner of a big bad piracy site rescues sony and ms, this is too good.

[ShutUpDonny]

Help those frustrated virgins to get laid.

[lipton101]

Hire a hitman - kill em all! /s if that really did happen though, I guarantee nobody else would be trying the same as these cowards

[The_KELRaTH]

Well one thought is blocking entire IP's of non Western countries till the source country is found.

It was a very effective measure when game IRC's were often attacked.

[pixelsword]

They don't need to do anything:

According to the US definition of terrorism in Title 18 of the United States Code, activities that intimidate or coerce a civilian population that happens outside of the US makes them a terrorist organization.

If they did it inside of the US, the Patriot Acts says the same thing: When Lizard squad demanded 10,000 RTS on Twitter to "stop smacking #Xbox and #PSN offline", they coerced citizens; officially becoming a terrorist organization in the eyes of the US, whether they are in the US or not.

Now, who knows what's going to happen to them...

[Majin-vegeta]

Ummm I keep getting security error/

The site ahead contains malware

[Relientk77]

Idk what is happening, but I literally have been getting that too all day on N4G

*Edit @ below: For the past 3 hours its been ALL links for me from N4G submissions

[DarkAstronaut]

Lizard Squads next target for their political agenda against taxes and prostitution is N4G.

https://www.youtube.com/wat...

=)

[mrbojingles]

Me too, but for a bunch of different links here on N4G. Like Dual Shockers, etc. Why?

[ZoyosJD]

It's the N4G redirect page that's the issue. The thing is every time you click out the N4G redirect page (that counts all the clicks for heat and whatnot) it also immediately links you to the site that was linked without clicking anything.

Because of its nature to do that google chrome and other web browsers have collected enough dings on it's record from sites with malware it has linked that they have put it on the "naughty" list.

Following the digital paper trail we can find the actual sites that are hosting the malware, whether they know or not...

"Of the 364 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 10 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2014-12-25, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2014-12-25.
Malicious software includes 111 trojan(s), 19 scripting exploit(s).

Malicious software is hosted on 5 domain(s), including gameobserver.com/, mmocast.com/, mbcobretti.com/.

3 domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware to visitors of this site, including pixelatedgeek.com/, waternfirerecovery.com/, mmocast.com/.

This site was hosted on 1 network(s) including AS36351 (SOFTLAYER)."

I'll be PM'ing a mod this info.

[Nitrowolf2]

it's n4g itself, has to be caus ei get it for all links when i click the sourcer

[d3nworth1]

I thought it was just me.

[SilentNegotiator]

Probably some bad N4G redirect links getting reported got all of them turned into a security issue for whatever browser/antivirus you're using that had the message.

edit: I'm getting it, too.

[ZoyosJD]

Yep, you generally had it. You can see the sites causing the issue in my post above.

I'm using chrome currently. Same for you and others with the issue?

[SilentNegotiator]

Firefox, actually.

[ZoyosJD]

Interesting, I noticed most hadn't commented on the matter and thought it might be browser specific. Then I'd assume they pull from the same list. Thanks for the input anyway.

I'll see if I can figure out a user end setting adjustment to fix this in the meantime.

[XtraTrstrL]

same here

[leemo19]

There's not much you can do to prevent ddos attack. Now MS and Sony can spend money and ask the FBI or CIA to help track down the ips of these people, since they are using twitter so its coming from somewhere.

[cl1983]

Fbi yes, but the CIA isn't "allowed" to work on projects that take place in the us only on foreign soil.

[OrangePowerz]

Well the CIA is not supposed to operate on the home turf. Thry still work together with the FBI and handle anything that needs to be done outside the US on cases while the FBI does the stuff at home. Granted since they.are fully separate departments their teamwork is probably not working that great.

[Blancast]

The CIA are also not "allowed" to torture people, but they still do that anyway.

[Whirlwind_Fanfare_08]

Somebody just exposed the lizard squad on twitter! got their name, phone number, location, members to. And they're all from canada! and it's a legit list btw. And.....there's face of one of them as well!

[FPS_D3TH]

Source? And we know this isn't a joke how?

[SonyWarrior]

http://lizardsquad.info/ none from canada

[Jonny5isalive]

someone should have them swatted lol.

[rainslacker]

Don't have to spend money to get the FBI to do their job, just file a complaint. Helps if they give whatever information they have.

However, I'm starting to think that LS isn't responsible for everything they claim they've done, because we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to several different companies, and that usually gets the FBI involved.

Could be that there is an investigation happening, but FBI wouldn't say anything due to it not being a good idea when tracking down a hacker.

[LightDiego]

Obama is speaking right now on television, he will declares war against Lizard Squad, David Cameron and Angela Merkel will do the same.
Switzerland said that will be neutral.

[tmh3593]

http://www.lizardsquad.info...

[jrshankill]

^This. There is nothing Sony or MS can do to their "security" to stop a ddos attack.. basically it's like flooding an ip with data to the point of overuse. All that can (and should) be done is have these lizard dicks tracked down and imprisoned for being knobheads.

[bubblebobble]

would really make me laugh seeing them in jail were not talking bad asses here were talking nerds locked up with badd asses cannon fodder

[GokuSolosAll]

Durr stan up 2 dem

I think they're a boogey man. Even if real, they pose a minimal threat, mere annoyance. Shut up with the drama. Take it to your lagina beaches or justin biebers or jersey shores or whatever you kids do these days.

[KwietStorm_BLM]

What the hell are you trying to speak?

[rainslacker]

If all these outages are due to DDoS, then we're talking about a lot of monetary losses to the companies that have been targeted. Sure it's not murder or anything, but I'd say it's far from an annoyance at this point.

[Ripsta7th]

Imagine nintendo was lizard squad hahaha

[q8kik]

The plot will surely thicken lol

[OrangePowerz]

They don't know the internet good enough for that.

[marloc_x]

Yet Nintendo's network has been solid..

[Aceman18]

@Marloc

That's because they don't have that many people on their service like psn and live.

[Baka-akaB]

Besides arent the most popular games stuff like Mario Kart or Smash ? They are awesome alright , but the volume of people and data is nothing compared to XBL , PSN or Steam

[Dirkster_Dude]

This article is stupid. So Sony and Microsoft should go ahead and tell us what the are doing so the whole world knows they can't be bullied. Just what makes you think they are doing nothing at this point?

[C_Ali88]

This blows, you don't pay for a subscription service and the company has insufficient or ineffective means to offer you the service. Cant play Destiny or anything online for that matter... sad

[MSBAUSTX]

But all digital game streaming is the way of the future. Lol what idiots those people are really looking like now. This is the exact reason why it will never happen. At least me and my buddies were able to get together and have a lan party today. Try to stop that lizzard Squad. Good luck playing Destiny.

[DarthJay]

Apparently KimDotCom settled everything for them:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media...

[InTheZoneAC]

drone strike every hacker location, problem solved...

[LonDonE]

No i say we nuke the place from orbit, its the only way to be sure! LOL

[cnote00]

All I can say is, if you're really tryna hit the powers that be where it hurts, hit them n THEIR wallets. I mean seriously, if u got the resources 2 do something like this at least get some $ outta THEM and not fuck it up 4 everybody else 4 everybody else.

[FPS_D3TH]

Here's hoping they get tried as terrorists when caught! They did threaten Sonys president with a bomb, did they not?! I also hope they're 13 years old so other basement dwelling turd nuggets take their shitty "hacking" skills and keep it to themselves out of fear. Id also be cool if their parents got charged because any parent letting their kid spend this much time doing shitty hacks deserves a fat charge for failure of decent parenting. If they can go after swatters for the love of God go after this cock holsters...

[UnHoly_One]

Yes I'd like to see them sent to prison and sued into destitution.

The only way to stop people from committing crimes is to make them fear the repercussions.

[rainslacker]

I believe the person that called in the bomb threat was arrested, and bomb threats are considered terrorism even if they aren't terrorist related, always been that way.

However, the hacks aren't really tied to the bomb threat, although I suppose there are ways to tie them together given some more recent laws.

I still think something is going on with this. If all these attacks are DDoS, it's just gone on too long, and been too public for these companies to just say, "oh well, it'll go away eventually". Too much loss has already occurred. Problem is is that it's hard to track down who actually initiates a DDoS, since the computers that do the attacks usually do so without the users knowledge.

[xActionBasturdx]

Anyone else having problems loading disc based games??

[Special-Agent-Milo]

GTAV and AW are glitching and lagging on my end. (PS4) might have to uninstall em and then install again

[MSBAUSTX]

Everything smooth for me. Played Diablo 3 in a LAN party all day and some COD AW for about 2 hours in a LAN as well. Had no issues.

[iceman06]

Many disc based games still have an initial online check for verification. So, many of those games will have issues. Some may not load at all. Especially if this is a first time play.

[nitus10]

Rubbish it is only on-line or on-line verification games that have issues with DDoS. If you have a stand alone game you won't be impacted.

[poor_cus_of_games]

Not rubbish. My physical copy of dead rising 3 is not working due to something to do with online. Even though I wanna play offline.

[DarXyde]

Sony basically flipped a giant bird to North Korea with The Interview.

I think both Microsoft AND Sony can stand up to some kids who probably never got out of their reptile phase in elementary school and lacked the creativity to come up with a new clubhouse name.

[smellslikeralph]

My ps4 and xbox one has both been down all day. I have not been able to play online at all. I received a free code for last of us digital and i cant even use it.

This is why im scared of an always online duture

[Special-Agent-Milo]

How'd you manage free TLOU code?

[Xaphy]

Haha also got a TLOU code and I cant use it. Got it from a friend who got the gta/tlou ps4 bundle. Oh well :(...

[Jonny5isalive]

yeah I got the bundle today and cant get my psn account or my digital last of us. Lucky that GTA 5 was an actual disk so atleast I got to play that.

[smellslikeralph]

My buddy bought a ps4 bundle gta and tlou and gave me the code free for xmas. But its currently useless cause i cant access the store to use it

[Relientk77]

I havn't been able to access the PS Store all day

[YamiMarik]

They can track them down but how are they going to catch Lizard Squad when they escape in their Lizardmobile?

http://25.media.tumblr.com/...

[JMyers]

Imagine if MS and Sony went with an always online system, with regular check ins? Hopefully this never happens. All the games that need online on consoles are unplayable at the moment.
Lizard Squad are attention seekers and more should be done by the authorities.

[kraydopy]

Do they fucking realize sorry for the language that there maybe people that are over seas that are fighting for there country and want to get on online to forget war or to play with there son or daughter because they cant be home. This has got to stop. Sony and Microsoft need to stop them no matter what it takes. Merry Christmas everone

[cyphertech]

That was me last year

[ScorpiusX]

Now there is a novel idea , wonder why I didn't I think of it first.

[BladerunnerZX]

I will find every and each one of these pathetic basement dwelling virgins and rip the testicals of slowly one by one so they do not infest the world with their puny nutsacks.

[Madrigal]

Who are you kidding, Bladerunner? These pathetic little bastards will never be able to trick a girl into sleeping with one of them.

[PaleMoonDeath]

My little brothers got their PS4's Christmas morning with the intention of playing The Last of Us online together, F*ck you Lizard Squad, when you're exposed and caught, I suggest a slap from every individual person affected by this, and then thrown into a snug little cell with a very, very large, and equally lonely man.

[iceman06]

Don't forget a simple note that reads "Jelly or syrup???" LOL

[PaleMoonDeath]

And "Flavoured or non flavoured?" Ha!

[goldwyncq]

It'd be hilarious if the LS are a bunch of Nintendo fanboys.

[ps5fanboy]

Just been reading about a child who was bought a one for Christmas , made plans with his friend what he was going to play and had been downloading a game for hours and hours to no avail , spent all day crying saying it is the worst Christmas ever , well done ls, you fucking scum bags , why not use your skills to wipe out debt or destroy the monetary system instead of ruining Christmas for gamers and especially children...

You got no fans.

[MultiConsoleGamer]

They can do what every other major internet related company is doing.

Hire their own hackers. Fight fire with fire.

[JaredH]

I'd honestly rather have Sony and MS use the money they get from their subscriptions to be used to beef up protection from DDOS attacks then for it to be used to get free games for us and other extra treats. I personally don't even have enough time to play the games I buy on my own. I'm guessing the majority of people wouldn't want this though.

[Muzikguy]

That's what I'd like to see too

[Baka-akaB]

Hey i'm all for less downtime , paying less , or not paying anything at all , but let's face it ... DDoS is a global, fundamental issue with the very structure of the Internet. It's a real problem that can't be solved just by throwing money at it.

You up the DDoS mitigation with money , the opposite side morons up the ante for free

[pop-voxuli]

PSN's back up!!

[gpturbo81]

the app works for me, but still cant play online..

[prodg52]

It's been going in and out for the last hour or so for me.

[Mrveryodd]

xbox live was broken at about 6 am here in Australia for about 3 hours . Worked for about 7 hours , trying to log on just now at 4pm . It's broken again ...... Lizard bitches you suck big time.

[Maxor]

If you're a billion dollar company and you can't solve the riddle of how to keep your service up during two consecutive Holidays then you no right to be in business.

Lets face it, Sony are amateurs compared to the real pros like Steam, Amazon, and Netflix. Lets put it this way, if Lizard Squad decides to go after Steam, Netflix and Amazon the same way it goes after Sony, who is going to win this contest? I guarantee you that Lizard Squad won't be as successful or be around for long.

Yet with Sony hackers are able to mount attacks with impunity. Pathetic.

[_FantasmA_]

You're such a fanboy. Xbox Live has been up and down all day too, so eat it fanboy.

[Madrigal]

You're the only fanboy here, bub. He literally made no mention of Xbox Live, yet you can't help yourself but assume that he's on the side of Microsoft... even though he made the implication that Steam was a better service than PSN. How god damn thick are you?!

It's worth adding that Live has been up and down for SOME people all day today. Here, in Australia, Live was up all day for me until three hours ago—then it came back on an hour ago. I have friends here and overseas who said that they have been on all day without any problems. I can't speak for Sony, as I haven't been on my PSN account in a while, but it seems as if though PSN is getting the worst of it.

If you can look at things objectively, it usually helps.

[kenshiro100]

If hou know so much, then why haven't you contacted Microsoft or Sony and shared your infinite wisdom?

Oh...wait.

[CorndogBurglar]

You have no clue what your talking about.

The DDoS attacks they are doing cannot be defended against...by anyone. They are flooding the servers with traffic. Thats essentially it. Nothing any company does can stop that.

Stop making this an anti-Sony thing, as the same thing is going on with Microsoft. Both services have been up and down for the past few days.

[mochachino]

Lizard Squad are the internets biggest trolls.

If they want to be the most hated group they're succeeding. What type of A-holes bring down gaming networks on Christmas, the day the most people get new games and consoles that they want to play and set up online.

When better hacker groups get the FBI to bring them down there should be a universal gaming online celebration.

[chiefdog11]

I know my 10 yr old son sure is bummed over this bs. Got him a white Destiny PS4 for Christmas and bought him 2 games he's been really wanting from the ps store. He can't play Destiny or download either of the new games we got him cause of these a~holes. I hate pricks like this who have to screw with others for no reason other than their own entertainment. Hope everybody had a great Christmas despite these jerks.

[NYGiants1987]

Thats what cable tv is for haha.

[PS4isKing_82]

Can someone help me who has an Xbox one? I just got an Xbox one today for A Christmas gift and I'm trying to change my background color and each time I pick one, it doesn't do anything and just stays black. I'm trying to change it to blue,red and other colors but nothing. Also vevo, Netflix, and hulu are still not working.

Am I doing something wrong? Would xbl being down affect my console not being able of changing the background color? Any answers would be greatly appreciated as I'm an Xbox one virgin lol :D

[socialkarma]

We know they're not from North Korea.

[addictedtochaos]

Sony and Microsoft should put a bounty on them.

[AO1JMM]

We the gamers need to stand up to them. If you see one of them kick his/her ass. LOL

[BladerunnerZX]

PS4 still down for me NA Texas. PS3 works fine.

[NYGiants1987]

What they did was the equivalent of stealing candy from millions of children. I hope your proud that you are a bunch of cruel individuals who crushed millions of children's hopes. You also took away from millions of hard working people worldwide who deserved a day off for peace, relaxation, fun and celebration. You are mega trolls who deserve everything that happens to you. Also don't get caught or you get minimum 10 year sentence. A few hours of taking down xbox live and playstation network worth 10+ years? I guess you like to play russian roulette. A terrorist is no different then a troll and I wish all governments would pass a law like in real life where if you feel threatened you can defend yourself. The day a bill passes where businesses can utilize self defense for threats that allows them to hack the hackers and destroy everything the hackers own will be amazing. Screw security it obviously is not effective enough. A anti-hacker hacking security team is the way to go. Not only would it give these useless trolls meaning in life but also weed them out in the process to have a purpose in life besides making others miserable. Here's to hoping !

[jeenyus]

The guy posting on that twitter keeps using the word "fam", knowing these kids are imbeciles, it's an easy guess that he's in the UK, some 14yr old nerd wannabee gangster identifying with american hip-hop music vids then later being sympathetic to ISIS.

[aerisbueller]

Does anyone know anything about cybersecurity/network infrastructure/law that can answer a simple question for me?

How do Lizard Squad and other random cyber(and noncyber) criminals not get immediately caught after bragging on Twitter or any other social media. I would have thought bragging (confessing) online about stuff would make you easily findable?

Regardless of what the laws 'should' be, for any random crime or terrorist threat, can't they get a warrant and request ip addresses from Twitter and then find the point of origin? I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I know I've seen this many times before, and for more serious crimes, and always wondered why they don't get caught.

[vric]

Even if Twitter would look at their IP, they would just see a random PC that got hacked and not their own PC. This is how they get networks down, thousands of hacked PC (botnet) which connects all at the same time. Unless they are really stupid, they would use one or many of these hacked PC to post on Twitter.

Even more complex, they can use an hacked PC to connect to another hacked PC, then another, then another to finally use Twitter. Making it very hard to trace where it came from.

It's one of the oldest trick for hacking and one of the easiest. The reason why a nolife kid can do that from his parent house.

[Baka-akaB]

Like said above twitter is no sufficient proof . And it's obvious those tweet accounts could be taken down but it would be useless as you create alts in mins .

Some law enforcement or private services are most likely just monitoring those and documenting potential offenses for some suspects

[snarls2000]

plus some jurisdictions don't allow IP adress as concrete proof of location. This is due to VPN's and people stealing WIFI signals from their neighbors

[DoubleYourDose]

It's quite simple: Make this type of attack a crime punishable by serious jail time and send the NSA after them. They can find a pebble in the ocean.

[socivL]

it's probably the illuminati.
they've been doing this kind of thing for centuries.
we as consumers and the company's themselves need to stand up against this tyranny.

[Tedakin]

Yeah I literally opened my gifts, which was a bunch of Xbox stuff, went into the den to the TV to find XBL was down... and it stayed down for the next 8 hours for me. So yeah.....

[RjK311jR]

is it only me or has anyone else noticed that when they click "Read Full Story," Google Chrome sends backs a malware warning! I've had to go to each of the sites by inputing the site address rather than through the links here on N4G

[Apocalypze]

How come people presume hackers are virgins that live at their mom's basement ???

[The_KELRaTH]

Yeah more likely the Russian Intelligence Agency in response to the results of sanctions.

If so not really much Sony or MS can do about it as it would require isolating Russia from the global internet infrastructure.

[DougLord]

Offer bounties. Do the same for movie and get thieves.

[DanielGearSolid]

I would really like to shoot one of those little bastards

Not kill tho, i want them to relish in pain

[cm_]

can't even view the link, get a security warning about malware on the article.

[BLAKHOODe]

They should tell their parents.

[chuckyj1]

All MS and Sony can really do is continue to fine tune their cyber defenses and turn over any and all useful data they can gather to the authorities if any can be gathered in these types of hacking attacks.

Arrests would be small in the overall picture, but it's the best MS and Sony can do...

[Many-hat5]

I'm no expert on this stuff, but how a company's security is set up can make a difference to how their systems cope with DDOS attacks. Here's just a couple of examples of the kind of things that can be done - again,I'm not trying to argue that DDOS can be stopped,but effects can be mitigated. BTW, lets start from the POV that all our personal machines are infected with malware or viruses/worms etc. to some extent- because it's usually true. Anyway,lets say through continued monitoring and experience,that we understand the normal traffic flow of our network - this kind of monitoring is common,I believe.Okay,first thing to do is to set a sensible expectation of connections we are expecting to our servers under any given condition. If this figure suddenly rises off the chart, for no good reason then we implement technologies to reduce the threshold and consequently the pressure on the servers - This is common practise from a security perspective. Also, we might issue new connection attempts (SYN's TCP 3 way handshake) with a token of sorts. Now if the response to a connection request comes back without that token, we can be pretty sure it isn't a legitimate request for a connection, and consequently drop that attempt from the buffer -normally it would be left to timeout waiting for response,hence overloading the servers resources.And, if instead of using the the server for this service we use firewalls, it is possible to divert a lot of the bogus connection attempts before they hit the servers.I know these techniques won't don't eliminate the problem, but they can help. I just wanted to illustrate that this problem can be handled in different ways, it's not as simple as nothing can be done. Of course for MS and Sony, it's a big problem, but it's worth understanding,if you didn't already, that companies do try to mitigate this kind of attack with varying degrees of success.

[vianco62]

Ok has anyone else finding you can't log on to there games again

[keegamer80]

I want every member of this so called squad d e a d!

[Tales RPG addict]

Everyone is gonna ate my 2 cents here.

My idea is simple have Sony & Microsoft hire these guys. I mean duh, whyy not since these guys can hack PSN & XBL then they can help benefit both companies by tightening their security and eliminating any possiblity of DDOS attack for both PS & Xbox users.

[ziggurcat]

A DDoS attack is not a hack. All it does is flood the server with requests until it crashes. There's no hack involved.

People like this should be thrown in jail, not hired.

[Knuckle Duster]

A bunch of 20 and 30 something's with obvious sad lonely lives! Reminds me of the Directv adds with Rob Lowe ....... As they wait at the front window for tonight's dinner " Pizza Hut " they hope it's not a girl delivery person or a male hahaha!
It really is to bad they can't find some way of being more constructive with there skill sets!

[ziggurcat]

The fact that PSN is still down in my area is unacceptable. This problem should have been remedied by now.

[Favre-orite]

I would like to see MS and Sony work together on this. Share info, tech, etc.

[Gambeno]

Anonymous Protection got involved and just hooked us all up, they doxed LIZARD SQUAD.... and posted all of their info, just in case you'd like to thank them for ruining your Christmas: http://pastebin.com/wFuH0w4...