Xbox Live and PSN to be shut down for a week, vows a group of hackers

A group of hackers has declared war against Xbox Live and the Playstation Network (PSN). The Phantom Squad has announced that they will shut down both the PSN and Xbox Live services during the holiday season straight for a week.

For the past week, online gaming services Xbox Live and PlayStation Network have been receiving threats from a hacker group. The group is known as Phantom Squad and these hacking threats are coming from their multiple Twitter accounts. According to the recent Twitter posts, the group claimed they have already knocked down Reddit on Tuesday with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The website did indeed go down for a short period of time. Reddit’s website status report suggests that the website database was under extreme load.

Recently, it was reported that more than 77, 000 Steam accounts are hacked every month and now Phantom Squad is claiming that it has already started attacking “the Grand Theft Auto 5,” the PlayStation Network and the Xbox Live as well. Last week, another hacker called CTurt also claimed to have a kernel exploit that can be used to jailbreak old version of PS4.

Last year, a group of hackers which called itself Lizard Squad attacked PSN and Xbox Live on Christmas Day. The group attacked these online game services and made them inaccessible for players around the world. For their hacking activities, three members of Lizard Squad were later arrested and charged with various offenses.

The attacks stopped when a popular gamer Kim Dotcom promised to give 3,000 accounts to Lizard Squad on Mega, an encrypted upload service, Forbes reported. Just after the new threats of attack on Xbox Live and PSN appeared, Dotcom again raised his voice on Twitter saying Sony and Microsoft had 1 year to upgrade their systems.

Phantom Squad recently released a threat to take down Lizard Squads’ Twitter account. To prove its strength, Phantom Squad also released a few videos to prove their hacking activities. TelegraphVoice reported that Phantom Squad has five members in their group. According to Phantom Squad, they perform hacking activities because they believe that cyber security does not exist.

If the hackers succeed in their war against Xbox Live and PSN, the Christmas this year will be dark for gamers. Hopefully, Sony and Microsoft will take necessary actions to prevent hackers. No official statement is released from any of the console manufacturers.

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