The Sony PlayStation online store was taken offline this morning, with visitors greeted with a message which read “Page Not Found! It’s not you. It’s the internet’s fault”.
According to media reports, the group “Lizard Squad” took credit for the outage, posting “PSN Login #offline #LizardSquad” on their Twitter account. This marks the second major instance of Lizard Squad hitting the gaming platform, after it previously hit it in August, while it also hit Xbox Live last week.
Dave Larson, CTO of Corero Network Security, said: “Organisations like Sony Playstation, Xbox and the like that rely on conducting their business online must respond to this escalating cyber threat proactively, with dedicated solutions for proper mitigation.
“There are two very practical initiatives that every business should consider to improve their defensive posture to Internet borne threats. First – invest in proactive technical defences against DDoS attacks and cyber threats to prevent them from achieving their goal of disrupting or compromising the business.
“Second – ensure that reactive response plans are developed and put in place to minimise the disruption caused by an attack that penetrates your defences – or is suspected of compromising your systems.”
David Emm, principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, said: “Details of the most recent attack from ‘Lizard Squad’ are still unclear, but at this stage it seems the recent string of Sony attacks are not connected. It is not uncommon for smaller groups to try and capitalise on a wave associated with a huge data breach or attack, and it is possible that this is what has happened in this case with Sony.
“Many people have questioned how such a breach could happen, but for big companies like Sony, it can become a nightmare to keep infrastructure secure. The bigger and more complex a company gets, the harder it is to protect its entire infrastructure.
“Security perimeters are very hard to defend nowadays anyway, and with thousands of employees spread all over the world, using different devices, running different operating systems and software packages accessing different internal or external systems through the network, security is a real and huge challenge.”
