Phantom Squad claims responsibility for PSN downtime

Infamous 'DDoS' group claims to have taken PlayStation Network offline

By
Matt Liebl
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If a series of tweets are to be believed, then we finally know what brought down PlayStation Network earlier this week. According to notorious DDoS group Phantom Squad, they are the ones responsible for bringing down PSN, presumably with a Distributed Denial of Service attack as we've seen in the past. 

Although the account was mostly quiet around the time PSN went down, the group recently tweeted the following.

They also retweeted Sony's acknowledgement of the problems.

Followed by the following threat.

Most recently the group admitted Sony is doing "all right" in overcoming the DDoS attacks, but did seemingly admit to another small scale attack on PSN.

Although Sony acknowledged problems with PSN earlier this week, they never fully revealed the cause and it's unlikely they'd ever admit to such DDoS attacks. However, given threats made back in December, it's not hard to suspect the group had some sort of role in the downtime. Back in mid-December, Phantom Squad threatened to take down both Xbox LIVE and PlayStation Network on Christmas. That never happened, and many had believed it to be nothing more than empty threats from a group seeking attention from the internet. Although, there was also a slight possibility that the companies had learned their lesson from December 2014 when Lizard Squad performed similar attacks that rendered both services inaccessible for many.

It's worth noting that several copycat accounts have been created since Phantom Squad's emergence, so it's hard to tell which is the official these days. Admittedly, I'm not entirely sure if the one above is legit or just trying to ride the downtime to internet fame. That being said, I don't think it's too unreasable to believe PSN's issues were caused by a series of DDoS attacks.

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