As you might be aware, the PlayStation Network (PSN) and Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) were attacked early this morning after the responsible group had already attacked Blizzard (World of Warcraft), Grinding Gear Games (Path of Exile), and Riot Games (League of Legends). Some sites have reported that PSN among others has been hacked which is quite unfortunate because the reason for today’s outages among these different gaming platforms is due to a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) and not a hack. This is an important distinguishing factor as a ‘hack’ would mean that those responsible were able to gain access to Sony’s networks and infiltrate them which could possibly lead to your information being compromised.

From Sony:

 Like other major networks around the world, the PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network have been impacted by an attempt to overwhelm our network with artificially high traffic.

Although this has impacted your ability to access our network and enjoy our services, no personal information has been accessed.

We will continue to work towards fixing this issue and hope to have our services up and running as soon as possible.

We regret any inconvenience this may have caused. 

The good news from all of this is that no personal information has been taken. Unfortunately, gaining access to PSN is still a bit shaky though things have improved dramatically since this morning. After the jump, some more thoughts and details about the attack that took place.

After the attack, the people behind the network outage claimed responsibility and though we’re aware of their group’s name, I see no reason in mentioning it and giving them any more attention. Frankly attacks like this are childish and truly hurt the gaming community, from lost revenue for Sony and its partners to gamers who may have finally had a few hours to sit back, relax, and enjoy some gaming time on Sunday. For better or worse, the attack itself isn’t all that sophisticated. A DDoS attack basically consists of servers being overloaded by too many requests.

Think of it like going to McDonalds 100 times within 5 minutes with different orders each time. Suddenly their service will crawl to a halt due to the excessive orders being placed. Today’s attack is no different which is why it’s so unfortunate to see so many media groups referring to it as a hack. Equally, it’s unfortunate that Sony continues to be in the headline while clearly other large entities were affected as well. We’ll be sure to bring you more information if more developments arise.

Discuss:

How has your experience on PSN been today?

[Via PlayStation Blog]