Christmas day 2014 will be a day that both Microsoft and Sony will recall with both horror and embarrassment thanks to the efforts of hacking group known as the Lizard Squad. December 25th 2014 is the day that the Grinch quite literally turned off Christmas for thousands of gamers and children around the world in a bid to highlight not only how easily the networks could be brought down, but how flawed the systems are. Chances are if you mention the Lizard Squad to an Xbox One or PS4 owner right now they wouldn't have a nice word to say about the hacking group that brought down Xbox Live and Playstation Network using denial of service (DDOS) attacks, but was it all bad? Those that were gaming back in 2011 will know that Sony is no stranger to DDOS attacks when another group known as Anonymous took PSN down for over a month. Since then of course both Microsoft and Sony have been at the center of some embarrassing leaks due to being hacked. Not only are the companies not doing anything to protect against these kinds of attacks, but they are making things worse with games that need to be checked in online before they will work which would be much better for gamers as it would force developers and publishers to stop releasing unfinished , broken excuses of games which rely on mandatory 'Day One' patches. Gamers have had a raw deal lately with a vast majority of games being released broken or incomplete thanks to a trend of fixing games on the fly. Removing mandatory online connections in games would put a stop to this and we could go back to the good old days of buying games that worked right out of the packet. The lizard Squad have actually highlighted that the current infrastructure that the PS4 and Xbox One are dependent upon is broken and in much need of either rethinking or fixing so that it actually works as it was intended. So who should we really be blaming for the Christmas Day outages, which actually continued for a further 5 days in Sony's case? I say the blame sits squarely on the shoulders of the companies that are taking our monies.
Are you kidding me 5 days still on xbox one as well. Yeah it may not be a consistent black out for MS like sony. But its been off and on. And i will agree the last few game releases have been a joke. Not sure whats going on with COD but about every 45 mins my game freezes up. And renders my xbox useless unless i hard reset it. I cant exactly blame lizard squad but im sure they had a nice help from the extra xbox ones that hopped online on the MS servers that day. I really dont think there that good a group of hackers. If you follow the online war going on between Anon and LZ than you would know this. There in my opinion a bunch of punk kids who like to take credit for other peoples work. There are several videos on youtube that you can have a look at that proves it. Quiet funny in my opinion. But MS and Sony do need to start protecting there gamers better or they will find a lot of us will switch back to playing PC.
I don't want to get in to the whole he said she said BS that comes with that blackhat territory of who did what, I am just writing based on fact, and the fact is Lizard squad took down the gaming networks.<br> Hopefully this will highlight the problems that currently plague the 'Next Gen' infrastructure and prompt the companies behind them to take action.<br><br>
Its funny that the Xbox site runs on the same server as the core services do. So he PS site would be up but the Xbox site would be down.
bullet has got a point Microsoft and sony need to put more effert into preventing it from happening again
