LizardSquad is responsible for the DDoS attacks on PSN, and the FBI is on their tail now

Aug 25, 2014 06:43 GMT  ·  By

The series of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks continues today, with an unexpected escalation that concerns a bomb threat against the flight carrying Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley.

Responsibility for the attacks was claimed by a group going by the name of the LizardSquad, which for the past 48 hours has been attacking various gaming services such as Blizzard Entertainment's Battle.net, Riot Games' League of Legends, and Grinding Gear Games' Path of Exile, culminating with a debilitating attack on Sony's PlayStation Network.

Sony confirmed the DDoS attacks on the PlayStation Network, resulting in many people being unable to connect and play their games over the course of the weekend, and assured its customers that no personal data of any kind was accessed during the event, further stating that its engineers would continue working toward fixing the issue, in order to have the services up and running as fast as possible.

Now it seems that things got a lot more serious, after American Airlines flight 362, carrying SOE President John Smedley, was diverted to Phoenix after the hacker group made a bomb threat, claiming that there were explosives aboard the airplane.

The FBI was called to investigate the threat, and Smedley confirmed that the flight was diverted. Local news crews reported from the scene, saying that passengers from the flight explained that the pilot had informed them of a security breach.

"The FBI is currently handling the situation at this time. We have no further comment," a Sony representative told GameInformer.

US authorities take threats of this nature very seriously, and now that the FBI is involved, Lizard Squad will most likely be the target of a federal investigation. The flight was carrying 179 passengers and six crew members, and Smedley mentioned that he would be flying from Dallas back to San Diego.

Furthermore, aside from aggravating everyday PSN users that would have liked to unwind by playing a game over the weekend, the group seems to have also irked some black and white hat hacking circles, with many discrediting the group's claims, and with the alleged real perpetrator reportedly taking his revenge by revealing the group members' personal information to authorities and Anonymous.

"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," the company wrote on the PlayStation Blog, assuring its customers that no personal data was accessed during the DDoS attack.