PlayStation Network Maintenance Recheduled DDoS

This weekend, Sony was hit with a Direct Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The attack caused outages for both the PlayStation Network and the Sony Entertainment Network, leaving gamers without access to games or online services. The anonymous hackers responsible also targeted Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley, tweeting out a bomb threat regarding his mid-air flight.

The hacker group, which has yet to give a direct reason for the DDoS attacks, also threatened to attack other major online services, including Blizzard's Battle.net and servers for League of Legends and Path of Exile. Both Blizzard and Xbox Live have revealed that there were issues with their services, but it appears as though the outages were never as major as those for Sony. Now, it seems as though PlayStation Network is up and running once more.

According to a new blog post by Sony, PlayStation Network is now back online, as well as the Sony Entertainment Network. PlayStation users can now play games online, continue any game downloads, make purchases from the PlayStation Store and use any other services and apps that PlayStation Network provides. Sony also confirmed that the "networks were taken offline due to a distributed denial of service attack."

Sony Entertainment Network

Sony has also revealed that the DDoS attack has forced some changes to their plans. Initially, there was going to be some maintenance done on the PlayStation Network today. According to the same post, this maintenance has had to be postponed. "In light of today’s issue, the networks will not undergo the regularly scheduled maintenance, which was planned for Monday, August 25," reads the post. "We will provide an update shortly for when the maintenance will be rescheduled."

When issues with the network were initially discovered, many fans were rightfully concerned that it could have been a repeat of the PlayStation Network outage of 2011. That attack resulted in the theft of sensitive user information and Sony losing an estimated $170 million – not to mention the lawsuits it faced from angry customers. Thankfully, Sony has "seen no evidence of any intrusion to the network and no evidence of any unauthorised access to users' personal information" with this most recent outage.

The two attacks are different beasts altogether, with this DDoS attack not an attempt to compromise security but instead flooding the service with an overwhelming level of traffic. That said, it could still be a blow to Sony's reputation, given the efforts taken to return trust to the company after the security breach of 2011.

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Did you suffer from any issues with your PSN service this weekend? Given the recent hacks to Polytron and Phil Fish, do you feel as though this is creating a worrying trend in terms of hacking to air grievances? Let us know in the comments.

Source: Sony