PlayStation Network from Sony Entertainment suffered a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack that brought down its servers for several hours Sunday morning.
A DDoS attack is performed by hackers who distribute a series of requests from a network. This causes the network to experience a large amount of traffic, so large that it can actually shut that network’s servers down, which is exactly what happened with Sony’s servers Sunday morning.
However, Sony’s team of programmers had the issue fixed within a matter of hours, and thankfully, user data, including emails, passwords and billing information, remained secured.
The news came as a huge relief to both Sony and PSN users. In 2011, PlayStation Network suffered one of the largest security breaches in history.
The breach caused over 77 million user accounts to be compromised, revealing the users’ personal and credit card information to hackers. It also caused a network outage that lasted 24 days.
Consumers interested in purchasing Sony’s PlayStation 4 should not be put off. The same team of hackers brought down Battle.net and Riot Games’ servers, the companies who own such games as World of Warcraft, Diablo III and League of Legends, shortly before they attacked Sony’s.
Basically, choosing one network over another will not save you from the frustration of having to deal with these attacks.
In lieu of the recent attacks, Sony has cancelled Monday’s scheduled maintenance.
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