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New Hacking Group Threatening Xbox Live and PSN with DDoS Attacks for Christmas

LizardSquad copycats are trying to ruin Christmas for gamers

Dec 16, 2015 14:04 GMT  ·  By
Phantom Squad threatening new attacks on Xbox and PSN for Christmas
   Phantom Squad threatening new attacks on Xbox and PSN for Christmas

Last year, the LizardSquad hacking group managed to ink its name into the history of Internet after taking down the Xbox Live and PlayStation networks during Christmas.

With this year's holiday just around the corner, a new group, unoriginally named Phantom Squad, is now threatening to carry out similar attacks as well.

If we believe their Twitter timeline, the hackers seem to have launched a DDoS attack against Reddit yesterday, even if nobody noticed its effects. Of course, a behemoth like Reddit is hard to take down in its entirety, but this was enough to attract people's attention to their cause.

During the past days, Phantom Squad has also been claiming it carried out DDoS attacks against the Steam network and servers for games such as Star Wars: The Old Republic, Grand Theft Auto 5, Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. The group has not provided any kind of proof for their attacks, and a quick Twitter search does not reveal any serious downtime in those services.

Smaller, probably test attacks were also launched against the Xbox Live and the PlayStation networks. A few of them resulted in short downtimes.

As for Phantom Squad themselves, they say they only have five members and no previous affiliation with Lizard Squad. Right now, Phantom Squad looks like a pathetic copycat, just trying to get attention. Of course, if we remember how things went last year, LizardSquad wasn't viewed as a real threat either, except when it was already too late.