No evidence of DerpTrolling hack of PlayStation Network and Windows Live found by Sony or Microsoft

The latest alleged hack of the PlayStation Network (PSN) and Windows Live was a hoax, Sony and Microsoft have confirmed.



Hacking group DerpTrolling claimed to have stolen 7m accounts, and allegedly leaked more than 5,500 usernames for the PSN, Windows Live and 2K Games via the anonymous text sharing site Pastebin. Both the hack and the leak now appear to be fake.

“We have investigated the claims that our network was breached and have found no evidence that there was any intrusion into our network,” said a Sony spokesperson in a statement.

Microsoft confirmed the same to the Guardian. “We immediately investigated reports regarding some Microsoft accounts, including Windows Live and Hotmail, and can confirm that no Microsoft site or service was compromised,” said a spokesperson.



A history of trolling

Active since 2011, DerpTrolling has previously been linked to attacks on League of Legends, Quake Live and Blizzard Entertainment’s Battle.net, which underpins the multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft. However, the PSN hack was quickly identified as a potential hoax by security experts.

“Looking through the list, there’s certainly an awful lot of crossover with data from previous breaches, in particular the Adobe one,” Rik Ferguson, vice president of security research at Trend Micro, explained to the Guardian at the time. “The random sample cross-referencing I have done certainly shows that the majority of data listed here has shown up already in previous breaches with very few exceptions which seem to appear only in this particular paste.”

Both Sony and Microsoft confirmed that they were actively looking at the hoax and any future intrusion attempts to monitor for fraud and account compromise.

A hack of the PSN would have been the third intrusion into the service since a major attack in 2011, which saw 77m accounts stolen and the online gaming service taken offline for 24 days. In this case, however, it appears that DerpTrolling has lived up to the second half of its name.

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