Sony is shaping up as the tech company hackers hate the most and is yet again under attack. First it was the Playstation Network a couple of years ago, then its Music store under threat, now Sony’s Online Entertainment President John Smedley has become a victim with his flight brought to ground.
Hackers are having a field day with Sony, causing its online Playstation Network to go down and getting the FBI involved in the investigation of an airline bomb threat that saw a plane diverted mid flight and safely landing in Phoenix.
Sony has been targeted by a DDOS attack, a distributed denial of service to overwhelm servers, with the Lizard Squad hackers saying they were also hacking into Blizzard’s World of Warcraft servers, and then threatening to attack Microsoft’s Xbox servers, according to Reuters.
Sony has assured its users no personal information has been leaked, but its customers who had lost access to Playstation servers can be forgiven for wondering exactly what is going on.
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Sony US says its Playstation Network is now back online.
The Lizard Squad hackers have caused Sony more chaos by tweeting American Airlines a threat suggesting the flight Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley was on had deadly explosives on board.
The tweet stated:
.@AmericanAir We have been receiving reports that @j_smedley’s plane #362 from DFW to SAN has explosives on-board, please look into this.
– Lizard Squad (@LizardSquad) August 24, 2014
This ruse worked, with American Airlines issuing a tweet notifying that a flight had been diverted.
Mashable reported Mr Smedley tweeting three times not long after saying:
“Something about security and our cargo. Sitting on Tarmac”.
The next tweet said:
“I hate American Airlines”.
The third tweet which happened whilst Mr Smedley plane was in flight en-route to Dallas from San Diego stated:
“Awesome. Flight diverted to Phoenix for security reasons”.
The FBI said it was investigating the threat.
Sony issued an official statement saying: “Like other major networks around the world, the PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network have been impacted by an attempt to overwhelm our network with artificially high traffic.
“Although this has impacted your ability to access our network and enjoy our services, no personal information has been accessed.
“We will continue to work towards fixing this issue and hope to have our services up and running as soon as possible.
“We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.”
