A newly-formed hacking group calling themselves ‘Phantom Squad’ has claimed it will take down Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network over the holiday period through sustained DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks. This will mimic successful attacks that occurred last year, where servers for online game services were forced offline for multiple days.

The group has previously proven its abilities, by sparking issues with both Xbox Live and Playstation Network connectivity. The group has also claimed responsibility for yesterday's short outage suffered by Reddit.

Phantom Squad appears to be rivaling Lizard Squad, who coordinated the infamous outages of many online gaming services towards the end of last year. Since these attacks, individuals have been arrested in relation to various cyber-crime incidents, but the group has still delivered similar attacks throughout the year.

The hackers claim that their primary motif is the lack of security implemented for these services, hoping to bring the issue to the attention of the public.

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. — Phantom Squad (@PhantomSqaud) December 13, 2015

Kim Dotcom who aided in stopping the attacks last holiday season, has said the blame will be on Sony and Microsoft this year for falling to upgrade the network infrastructure to cope with these attacks.

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! — Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) December 14, 2015

The official Anonymous Twitter account has also sided with the attackers, claiming that the corporations are at fault for failing to deal with these issues.

If PSN or Xbox live goes down, Microsoft and Sony are the blame. You would expect these corporations to have sufficient DDoS protection. — Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) December 16, 2015

Source: Phantom Squad (Twitter) via GameZone | Image of hacker via Shutterstock