Hacking group claims responsibility for PlayStation crash

The hacking group Phantom Squad has taken credit for downing Sony’s PlayStation Network for most of the day on Monday.

“#psn #offline #off for some users. We are back for some action!” the group tweeted Monday.

{mosads}Sony has not yet issued a statement on the causes behind the outage. The network is now restored.

Phantom Squad threatened last month to knock out both Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network by flooding the networks with phony traffic until they crash, a technique known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

“We are going to shut down Xbox live and PSN this year on christmas. And we are going to keep them down for one week straight #DramaAlert” the group tweeted in December, shortly before claiming responsibility for brief service disruptions in Xbox’s network.

Tweeting from an eponymous account, the group said it is taking action because the makers of the devices aren’t doing enough to adequately safeguard their networks.

The threats echo another case of holiday gamer “hacktivism.” Last year, the more well-known hacking group Lizard Squad took down the same two networks on Christmas Day, allegedly to force XBox and PlayStation to upgrade their cybersecurity.

The group’s members are widely thought to be younger and less sophisticated than Anonymous, arguably the most well-known organized hacking group.

Earlier this fall, four U.K. teens were released on bail on charges of launching cyberattacks using a tool made by Lizard Squad. The teens allegedly used the “Lizard Stresser” DDoS tool to attack a national newspaper, a school, gaming companies and several online retailers.

The arrests were part of a larger raid intended to identify individuals linked to Lizard Squad.