FEB 25, 2016 @ 06:24 PM
Hacker Group Claims It Could Knock Xbox Live 'Off The Face Of The Earth'
Dave Thier, CONTRIBUTOR
Xbox Live has been having some headaches recently. Connection was spotty for days last week, with the status page constantly updating as Microsoft MSFT -0.22% engineers appeared to be working furiously to return stability to the gaming platform. A DDOS attack of the sort that brought both PSN and Xbox Live down last christmas may be behind the outages, and a hacker group known as “New World Hackers” has taken responsibility, adding Xbox Live to a list of other targets that range from the BBC to Donald Trump to ISIS. Newsweek recently talked to New World Hackers, offering an interesting insight into the group’s mentality. We’ve reached out to Microsoft and will update with any more information. The Department of Justice, as a matter of policy, neither confirms nor denies if they’re treating these claims as legitimate.
“Well, didn’t even take as long as I thought,” a member of New World Hackers told Newsweek in reference to the attack. “We attacked Xbox to protest. Major companies like this have massive servers but no real protection. We want Xbox to update the protection they have, which isn’t much.”
It’s a similar sentiment that we heard from Lizard Squad regarding PSN: their major gripe was that Sony had started charging money for the formerly free service without beefing up performance and security in the meantime. And since these attacks are also meant to prove what the group is capable of, they also made some more boastful claims about Xbox Live’s vulnerabilities:
“[The Xbox attacks] also prove we do have as much power as we say we do, going out to the doubters. [We could] honestly knock Xbox off the face of the Earth.”
This is the part where we consider the caveats. While it’s entirely possible, that Xbox Live was taken down as a result of a DDOS attack, it is incredibly difficult to confirm such an attack, and more difficult still to confirm whether or not New World Hackers was actually behind the outages, and their claims about the BBC attack have been questioned as well. Still, the threat of DDOS attacks to major networks like Xbox Live has become very clear. Even if actual culpability remains elusive, it’s becoming quite clear that these companies need to beef up their protections if they want to restore consumer faith in their services.
Video game servers make ideal targets for hacker groups looking to make a splash: they’re user facing, and people notice when they go down. Both the Xbox One and the PS4 are designed to function as constantly connected devices, and if the companies behind them can’t guarantee the stability of those connections, they start to look a whole lot less useful.
