People are freaking out that hackers will ruin Christmas for gamers again
Last year, the now-notorious hacking group Lizard Squad launched a DDoS attack against Xbox Live (XBL) and PlayStation Network (PSN). It's a way of overwhelming a service with malicious traffic, thereby crashing it - and Lizard Squad's attempts were successful, leaving both gaming networks offline for Christmas day, and with PSN suffering from difficulties for days afterwards.
A year later, and the hacking group is signalling that it is preparing to carry out a similar attack again. On December 18, a Twitter account associated with Lizard Squad retweeted a tweet indicating it is planning to target PSN and XBL at Christmas.
Lizard Squad also claimed responsibility for an outage of PSN during Black Friday - though it's not clear whether this was actually their doing, or the result of a surge of holiday-related traffic.
On December 16, XBL went down, with another hacking group - Phantom Squad - claiming responsibility on Twitter. Using their now-deleted account, they said that Sony and Microsoft need to "improve their security."
Phantom Squad's website was subsequently defaced by another hacking group, and a "dox" has been circulating - a document containing the alleged personal information of the group's members. Softpedia reports Phantom Squad is planning to try and take down XBL and PSN consistently between December 24 and December 30.
Last time around, controversial file-sharing entrepreneur Kim Dotcom tried to "save Christmas" by giving Lizard Squad 3,000 vouchers for his site Mega in return for stopping the attack - effectively paying a ransom.
The logic behind the attacks is obvious: XBL and PSN are a huge, challenging target, and taking them down during Christmas causes maximum disruption for all the people who have just given/received games consoles as presents. If the attackers can make a profit in the process - all the better.
People are responding to the threats and hacker in-fighting with a mix of worry and disappointment:
Microsoft declined to comment. Sony did not respond to a request for comment.