The PlayStation Network is back online ... for now.



The global gaming service used by 110m people was brought down on Christmas Eve, seemingly by a hacking group calling itself Lizard Squad. On Sunday however, Sony assured customers via its PlayStation blog that the system was now functioning.



The company also admitted for the first time that the disruption was caused by hackers who used a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack to flood the PlayStation servers with traffic, bringing access to a halt.

“As you probably know, PlayStation Network and some other gaming services were attacked over the holidays with artificially high levels of traffic designed to disrupt connectivity and online gameplay,” read the post. “This may have prevented your access to the network and its services over the last few days.”

Microsoft’s Xbox Live infrastructure was also attacked, reportedly by the same group, which revelled in its achievement via a series of tweets throughout Christmas day. However, the Xbox online infrastructure was functioning again by Boxing Day.

Formed in mid-2013, Lizard Squad has been stepping up its media profile in the wake of the Christmas attacks. In a series of interviews, two self-declared founding members have claimed that their motivations are amusement, and to highlight the security weaknesses of the systems.

“If I was working [at Microsoft or Sony] and had a big enough budget, I could totally stop these attacks,” “Ryan Cleary” (a pseudonym borrowed from an infamous LulzSec hacker) claimed to tech news site Daily Dot. “I’d buy more bandwidth, some specific equipment, and configure it correctly. It’s just about programming skill. With an attack of this scale, it could go up to the millions. But that’s really no problem for Sony and Microsoft.”

Speaking to Sky News, “Cleary” added, “These companies make tens of millions every month from subscriber fees and that doesn’t even include purchases made by their customers.

“They should have more than enough funding to be able to protect against these attacks.”

Lizard Squad has claimed that its actions against Sony and Microsoft were more sophisticated than standard DDoS attacks, which don’t usually require hackers to gain access to the target’s online infrastructure.

“There’s plenty of people saying we’re not hackers and DDoS isn’t hacking. For attacks of this scale, you can’t really do them without either having access to insane amounts of funding or being able to gain access to the computers via hacking,” “Cleary” said to Daily Dot. “You can’t just do DDoS attacks from your home computer. It doesn’t work.”

The group has even suggested that it has access to undersea cables that facilitate internet connections between the US and Europe.

But its appetite for fame may prove to be Lizard Squad’s undoing, after security journalist Brian Krebs claims to have uncovered the possible true identities of at least two members, both of whom have conducted TV interviews in the wake of the attacks.

“Ryan Cleary”, Krebs claims, is in fact a Finnish teenager. Krebs claims the other founding member is a 22-year-old Briton. Krebs says that he has found one of these men enquiring on the site Hackforums about how to dispose of Mega vouchers; Krebs claims this was a reference to the $300,000 bribe in vouchers the group allegedly received from Kim Dotcom for stopping the attacks.



“Both of these individuals may in fact be guilty of nothing more than taking credit for other peoples’ crimes,” Krebs writes. “But I hope it’s clear to the media that the Lizard Squad is not some sophisticated hacker group. The Lizard Squad’s monocle-wearing mascot shows them to be little more than a group of fame-seeking kids who desperately aspire to be like LulzSec, a similarly minded gang whose core members are all now in jail. With any luck, these kids will get their wish soon enough.”

Lizard Squad first came to public attention in August, when it claimed responsibility for a previous DDoS attack on the PlayStation Network. It was even implicated in a hoax bomb warning, delivered to an American Airlines flight which had a senior Sony executive onboard. The size and location of the group is unknown, although it claims to be just a handful of programmers. In an interview with YouTube news channel Drama Alert, representatives of the group claimed to be coordinating their attacks via a data centre in Moldova.

Often formed by young men from the gaming communities, hacking collectives have been targeting gaming brands and services for a number of years. PlayStation Network has been hit several times, as have the online services of game publishers Activision, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft. The motives are usually peer recognition and fun. Inter-group rivalries are common; when Lizard Squad launched its DDoS attack against PSN and XBL on Christmas eve, another hacking collective named Finest Squad claimed to have intervened, ending the cyber assault.



“We prevented the attack on Christmas Eve. If we didn’t knock their main botnet offline, it would’ve been two days of straight maintenance,” the group wrote on Twitter.



On Boxing day, a group claiming affiliation with hacktivist collective Anonymous released what it said were credit card details, user names and passwords drawn from an array of services including Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, Amazon and Walmart. 13,000 user accounts were reported to have been compromised. “We did it for the lulz,” the group tweeted.



The Christmas attacks have proved substantially less fun, however, for the millions of gamers who found themselves unable to access the online services of their consoles, ruling out multiplayer gaming, and video on demand applications.



It is also a serious problem for games companies. Sony, already reeling from the high-profile hacking of its movie division, will need to show that it is committing significant resources to overhauling its online security. In the meantime, there is speculation around the industry that the company will offer compensation to PlayStation owners, possibly in the form of free downloadable games or credits for the PlayStation Store.



Given the publicity it has garnered so far, it’s unlikely Lizard Squad will cease its efforts – especially as they are also proving profitable. Kim Dotcom’s apparently successful offer of 3,000 lifetime access vouchers for his Mega file-sharing service, providing 500gb of encrypted data storage per voucher and worth $300,000, if they stopped the hack – has opened an intriguing new door for hackers everywhere.



