Over the weekend, gamers across Xbox Live and PSN were hit pretty hard with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) after a malicious group known as the Lizard Squad overwhelmed servers and disconnected players. The reason behind the attacks are unknown at this time, as Sony is claiming no information from its users was at risk. Microsoft users also claimed to have been limited to their accessing servers online and experienced scattered boots from servers as well. Though Sony and Microsoft were impacted, reports came in from Riot Games (League of Legends) and Blizzard (World of Warcraft) all from the same group claiming responsibility.
Though it is possible that Lizzard Squad had intended to steal user information, a lot of times hackers just like to exploit security flaws and brag of their skills in taking gaming titans like Sony down, for instance as some sort of boasting right amongst the hacker community.
Gamers should rest easy knowing that their information is not at risk, though they won’t be able to play online for at least a few hours until servers are up and running again.