PSN Network Hit By DDOS Attack, Back Online But Sony Postpones Maintenance

Sony’s PlayStation Network was hit by a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack this weekend which affected service. As of today the service has resumed normal operation but Sony have had to cancel their planned August 25th maintenance as a result. The DDoS attack has hit Sony hard because PSN is the backbone of all Sony Services for the PS Vita, PS3, PS4 and Sony Online Entertainment MMOs. Sony has already publicly confirmed that these are just DDoS flood attacks: no personal data has been compromised like back in 2011 when 93,000 accounts were hacked and their data compromised. Clearly Sony have learnt some lessons.

So what have Sony been up against? Well the hacker has already come forward: “FamedGod” claims that they managed to pump a staggering 263.35 Gbps of traffic at Sony’s server during the DDoS attack so it’s hardly surprising the PlayStation Network went down. The DDoS was carried out by abusing NTP (network time protocol) servers. The hacker even went as far as making a video to explain how the attack was possible – making it explicitly obvious to Sony what they need to fix to protect themselves against such an attack in future. Let’s hope Sony learn from their mistakes, they should count themselves lucky that the hacker was not interested in stealing personal data.

Source: Sony, Via: Softpedia

Image courtesy of Sony