PlayStation Network: Phantom Squad claims responsibility for outage

Sony has confirmed that its PlayStation Network experienced issues, affecting all services across the platform including PSN4, PS3 and PS Vita on 4 January. Phantom Squad, the new hacking collective, claimed responsibility for the attack.

Users trying to access the PlayStation Network were greeted with a message saying: "You may have some difficulty signing in or creating an account on PlayStation Network. Our engineers are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, and we thank you for your patience."

Sony has now fixed the issue. The PlayStation Network Service Status page suggests all services are back online and working. This is PlayStation's first outage in 2016. Many users faced login issues during Christmas 2015.

Meanwhile, hacking collecting Anonymous confirmed that the PlayStation Network was down in all countries.

Phantom Squad urges better cybersecurity

Phantom Squad, which claimed responsibility for Xbox Live network outage in December 2015, had earlier threatened to carry out attacks on both Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network during Christmas. The proposed attacks, the group said, would serve as warnings to Microsoft and Sony to improve their cybersecurity.

A member of the Lizard Squad, which carried out DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks on the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live on the Christmas of 2014, revealed Phantom Squad's plan saying: "Right now they're just empty threats, but it's very possible [that the attack will happen]. One of the guys [from Phantom Squad] is a friend of ours [Lizard Squad's] and he probably does have the resources."

"It's probably 50/50, because right now they want to carry on a legacy. It happened last year, which is quite a while ago now. And they want to do it again. It's a wannabe group really. It's just a repeat of last year. It's pretty much a copycat if you look at Lizard Squad and Phantom Squad, it's the same thing," he added.