Phantom Squad, the group of online hackers, made a threat to shut down PlayStation Network and Xbox Live on Christmas through a series of distributed denial of service or DDoS attacks, a coordinated bombardment of forged incoming server traffic causing the crash of a system.
If Phantom Squad succeed in their plans, the people who are expecting the new gaming consoles that are set to come on Dec. 25 will be affected as the gaming network will most likely go offline.
Only a year ago when the notorious hacker group called Lizard Squad claimed the shutting down of PSN and Xbox Live for a couple of days. They demanded more Twitter followers and more retweets in exchange for the restoration of the servers, NYDaily News reported.
Microsoft and Sony both got a chain of attacks in the past year, yet the tactics that they have developed in order to try and prevent these issues remain unknown. Both companies have been warned via Twitter, by the notorious Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, that is behind the Megaupload, that updating the servers will totally prevent the attack. While Microsoft and Sony work on enhancing their servers, those who purchased a console as Christmas present may unbox, unplug it and download the updates once they purchase it. In this way, they can play offline games this Christmas. Or else, if the Phantom Squad releases the DDoS attack, any console would be of no use without being updated and powered on, Daily Star reported.
Phantom Squad, meanwhile, is not linked to Lizard Squad and maintains that their group conducted smaller outages on gaming community servers and other sites like the Reddit.