Hacking group SkidNP vows to target Steam and Minecraft servers this Christmas
Hacking group SkidNP promises to attack on Steam and Minecraft servers during the holiday period
A member of the hacking group SkidNP who runs the @Obstructable Twitter handle told Neowin that his group “will be attacking Steam and Minecraft servers” over the holiday period. Earlier today, SkidNP had claimed responsibility for defacing the website of rival hackers Phantom Squad, shortly before that site went offline.
Similarly, earlier this week, Phantom Squad said it was planning to take down Xbox Live and PlayStation Network with outages over Christmas. Further, it took responsibility for an outage that hit the Xbox Live network and caused connection problems for gamers on December 17.
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However, it appears that Xbox Live and PSN may not be the only gaming services to be hit over the festive season.
While acknowledging the publicity that such attacks bring in for hacking groups, he claimed that the ultimate aim is to force companies like Microsoft, Sony and Valve to do more to stop them. “We will be hitting them because we are trying to make services like them [prevent]these sort of attacks, so they get stronger,” he said. “Anyone with a $5 booter can take down Xbox if they have the right IP.”
As Obstructable says that the objective of the attack is to force tech companies such as Microsoft, Sony and Valve to improve the security of their servers. This goes in line with what Phantom Squad has tweeted earlier, before the group’s Twitter account was suspended saying, “I get asked a lot on why we do this? Why do we take down PSN and Xbox Live? Because cyber security does not exist.”
While most will of course blame the hacking groups themselves, some believe that the companies who own the networks should bear at least some of the responsibility. Even Kim Dotcom believes that the companies are to be blamed for not improving their servers.
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Warning @Sony & @Microsoft. You had 1 year to upgrade your networks. If Lizard Squad takes down PSN & XBOX this Xmas, we’ll be pissed! RT!
3:02 AM – 15 Dec 2015
Similarly, on Wednesday, global hacking collective Anonymous made a similar comment: “If PSN or Xbox live goes down, Microsoft and Sony are the blame [sic]. You would expect these corporations to have sufficient DDoS protection.”
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