Following yesterday’s distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, Sony said this morning both the PlayStation Network and the Sony Entertainment Network are back online. Users can now resume game downloads, play games online, buy stuff off the PlayStation Store, use apps and all the other PSN services as normal. Furthermore, the PSN maintenance that was due to take place today is to be rescheduled. The company will announce the new date and time for the maintenance “shortly.”
Sony’s PlayStation Network is back up and running after a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that overwhelmed its servers. The company said in a blog post early Monday that, despite the attack, it had “seen no evidence of any intrusion to the network and no evidence of any unauthorized access to users’ personal information.” So this isn’t a repeat of the big PlayStation Network breaches of 2011, which saw the theft of personal details of millions of users. Sony said in its post that it would forgo scheduled network maintenance that had been scheduled for Monday, and apologized to its users for the inconvenience of the downtime. In DDoS attacks, the attackers flood the target’s servers with data until they can no longer cope, either disrupting or outright killing the service they’re providing. It seems there may be a link between the PlayStation Network DDoS and a Sunday bomb threat that diverted an American Airlines flight carrying Sony Online Entertainment chief John Smedley. A Twitter account belonging to “Lizard Squad” made the threat, specifically referring to Smedley, and also suggested that whoever is behind the account was also directing the DDoS attack.
