Xbox Live And PlayStation Network Are Still Down, And The Hacker Gang 'Lizard Squad' Is Loving It

Dave SmithDec 26, 2014, 19:48 IST

Xbox Live and PlayStation Network are still down, as of Friday. Both game networks have been experiencing regular outages since Wednesday. And during this 48-hour period, the hacker gang "Lizard Squad" has been tweeting incessantly, announcing every time one of the networks goes down and asking for Twitter follows, favorites, and retweets to restore service. In fact, one Lizard Squad Twitter account has grown from under 30,000 followers on Wednesday to more than 150,000 followers on Friday. Lizard Squad is apparently launching massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that overload the servers with bogus requests. Sony and Microsoft have both been very responsive on Twitter, but they've only mentioned "network issues." They have not confirmed that these outages are the result of DDoS attacks, online or to Business Insider. A separate hacker group, called "The Finest Squad," is trying to offset these attacks by DDoSing Lizard Squad's own servers to stop these attacks at the source. But The Finest Squad has also complained that Sony and Microsoft aren't doing enough to protect their own servers. Sony and Microsoft are scrambling to protect their networks from these constant attacks - but it sounds like both networks need a security upgrade. In an interview with WinBeta, Lizard Squad said Microsoft has "almost nothing" in terms of security, and even though Sony apparently upgraded its security recently, it only took "a bit of time to work around." We're continuing to reach out to Sony and Microsoft and we'll update this story when we hear back.

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Xbox Live And PlayStation Network Are Still Down, And The Hacker Gang 'Lizard Squad' Is Loving It