Phantom Squad, the hacking group that threatened a few days ago to shut down the Xbox Live and PlayStation Network networks during Christmas, managed to "bring down" Xbox Live for a few hours yesterday, demonstrating its "technical" capabilities.
The group first made its presence felt on the hacking scene this month, when it began carrying out short-term DDoS attacks on various popular game servers.
These included the servers for Star Wars: The Old Republic, Grand Theft Auto 5, Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.
The group members then turned their sights to bigger targets and began launching DDoS attacks on the Steam and Reddit networks.
[alert variation=”alert-info”]Phantom Squad follows in the footsteps of LizardSquad, the notorious hacking group that took down Xbox Live and PlayStation Network last year, but they have stated that they are in no way associated with it.[/alert]
The Phantom Squad had warned on social media of their attack, but their threats were not taken seriously. In response, the Phantom Squad briefly took down Xbox Live yesterday, while also posting on Twitter.
The group even warned that its next target is the Playstation Network.
At the time of writing, the Pantom Squad Twitter account has been suspended.
The Xbox Live attack lasted for a few hours, hitting Microsoft's defenses, while Xbox users reported problems purchasing items, redeeming codes, or downloading their purchases. After the attack began, Microsoft posted the following message on its status page:
“Xbox members, are you experiencing issues playing your purchased content? We are aware of the issue and our top engineers are on the case. We appreciate your patience as we work on this and will update you as soon as we have more information.”.
