Why Pay For “The Hobbit” When This Epic Hacker Battle Is Free?
If you had trouble logging into PSN or XBox Live yesterday, you’re not alone. The servers for both services were overloaded and rendered inoperable. You might assume it was the result of a typical Christmas Day rush, but the truth is…far more interesting. Would you believe a hacker war straight out of an early Angelina Jolie film? In August, a DDOS attack brought down Playstation Network and Blizzard’s servers for a short time. On the same day, a bomb threat was tweeted targeting a plane flight the head of Sony Online Entertainment was on, and the plane was forced to make an early landing. A group of Anonymous-esque hackers calling themselves “Lizard Squad” claimed responsibility, and started virtually high-fiving each other. Lizard Squad kept up their antics through the following month, crashing servers that ran the online components of Grand Theft Auto V and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Then they disappeared for much of the fall season, until they brought Sony and Microsoft servers down again on December 1