Millions of gamers were spared any downtime over Christmas as pre-holiday threats by Lizard Squad, Phantom Squad and R.I.U. Star Patrol to take down PlayStation Network and Xbox Live proved hollow.
Valve's Steam store site was offline for a period on December 23, according to Gamespot, but this may have been due simply to a large amount of traffic hitting the site when its holiday sale went live. However, the hacking group PhantomSquad tweeted on December 23 that it was responsible for the site's problems. PhantomSquad also took credit for hitting several Electronic Arts' servers with a DDoS attack. Neither claim has been confirmed by Valve or Electronic Arts.
All three hacking groups stated in tweets early last week that they intended to once again go after the two major gaming networks that together have more than 150 million users. This scenario has played out over the last several holiday seasons with the most recent damaging attacks taking place in December 2014 when Xbox Live and PSN were taken down.
