Sony's PlayStation network returned to normal operations Monday morning after being overwhelmed with artificial traffic. A hacker group claimed it planted an ISIS flag on Sony's servers and prompted the diversion of a commercial flight on which a Sony executive was traveling, though a more infamous collective of hackers may have been behind the PSN outage.
The distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks were said to have struck Sony's North American servers with a series of rolling outages and Hack Lizard claimed responsibility for the weekend attacks.
Sony, which has been battling a PSN glitch, said it would announce on its blog a new date for the regular maintenance it had planned to perform on PSN Aug. 25 before the outages began. The company assured PSN users that no personal information was compromised by the attacks.
"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," Sony stated during the outage. "Although this has impacted your ability to access our network and enjoy our services, no personal information has been accessed."
An American Airlines flight heading to San Diego from Dallas was redirected to Phoenix, after fielding an anonymous tip that falsely alleged a bomb was on board the air plane that was carrying Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley. Hack Lizard later claimed responsibility for the hoax and hassle.
"Yes. My plane was diverted. Not going to discuss more than that. Justice will find these guys," said Smedley.
Justice may have already found the Hack Lizard group, though there was evidence indicating another group of hackers may be responsible for the PSN attacks. A member of the much more infamous collective of hackers, Anonymous, released what was said to be a listing of all of the IP addresses of individuals associated with Hack Lizard.
"#LizardSquad I am you father, and I need you to stop this nonsense right now or im taking your laptop away. For a week," stated an Anonymous member on Twitter.
Anonymous member FameGod released the image of Hack Lizard's IP addresses, along with text directing the exposed group to stop taking credit for Anonymous' work.
Back in April 2011, Sony's PSN suffered a similar DDoS attack that compromised the personal accounts of more than 100 million PSN, Sony Online and Qriocity members. Changes made in 2011 may have prevented the August 2014 attacks from being much worse.
"The company has made considerable enhancements to the data security, including updating and adding advanced security technologies; additional software monitoring and penetration and vulnerability testing; and increased levels of encryption and additional firewalls," Sony stated in the aftermath of the 2011 outage.
"The company also added a variety of other measures to the network infrastructure, including an early-warning system for unusual activity patterns that could signal an attempt to compromise the network."
