Sony Corp said its PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network had been disrupted by hackers in a distributed denial-of-service attack on Monday.<\/p>\n
Sony said its systems were back online and the company was investigating the cause of the disruption.<\/p>\n
The company has not received any report of user information being stolen, Sony spokeswoman Jennifer Clark told Reuters.<\/p>\n
Sony said users faced difficulty accessing the PlayStation network between 8.52 a.m. and 11.18 a.m. Tokyo time on Monday (6.52 p.m.-9.18 p.m. ET Sunday), and the issue has been resolved.<\/p>\n
The outage followed a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack on the PlayStation network in August, for which a Twitter user with the handle @LizardSquad had claimed responsibility.<\/p>\n
DDoS attacks attempt to cripple networks by overwhelming them with Internet traffic.<\/p>\n
A tweet on Monday from a user with the handle @LizurdPatrol and account name Lizard Squad said: “50 RTs (retweets) and we will hit off PSN (PlayStation Network). 50 FAVs (favorites) and we will hit off XBOX LIVE.”<\/p>\n
The Financial Times said that some visitors to the PlayStation online store were greeted with the message: “Page not found. It’s not you. It’s the internet’s fault.”<\/p>\n
Last month, Sony’s Hollywood studio, Sony Pictures Entertainment, was hit by a massive hack that shut down most of the studio’s network for more than a week.<\/p>\n
Following that attack, hackers released sensitive data over the Internet, including employee salaries and social security numbers along with high-quality digital versions of several unreleased films.<\/p>\n
Sony’s brushes with hackers date back to 2011 when PlayStation network suffered a major attack, resulting in the theft of data belonging to 77 million users.<\/p>\n
Sony’s U.S.-listed shares were down 4.3 percent at $21.21 on the New York Stock Exchange in afternoon trading on Monday.<\/p>\n
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