This holiday season was a pretty rough one for both, Microsoft and Sony, as both saw their online networks for their respective consoles being brought down and crippled by Lizard Squad, who mounted and launched a DDoS on Xbox Live and PSN, causing grief to a lot of consumers who probably had just gotten brand new consoles for Christmas.

It appears now that an 18 year old man in UK has been arrested on suspicion of being involved in these DDoS attacks. Gamespot reports that the arrest was made as part of a joint effort between UK cybercrime authorities, including the South East Regional Organized Crime Unit and the National Cyber Crime Unit, and the FBI.

“This investigation is a good example of joint law enforcement cooperation in relation to a type of criminality that is not restricted by any geographical boundaries,” SEROCU Cyber Crime Unit head Craig Jones said in a statement.

“We are still at the early stages of the investigation and there is still much work to be done. We will continue to work closely with the FBI to identify those to who commit offences and hold them to account.”

Association of Police Officers cyber security lead Peter Goodman added: “This arrest demonstrates that we will pursue those who commit crime with the false perception they are protected within their own homes or hiding behind anonymous online personas.”

Among the many charges that were leveled at the accused were unauthorized access to computer material, unauthorized access with intent to commit further offenses, and even threats to kill- so he may be in some trouble here.

Personally, on my part, the Lizard Squad has been an absolute nuisance, and they have crossed all limits and boundaries of what is acceptable. At this point, they are just criminals and terrorists, and they should be treated as such, so I am glad to see that tangible action is being taken against them.

The Lizard Squad has been attacking Sony’s PlayStation Network again, and this has been leading to intermittent network outages over the last day or so. This was especially frustrating yesterday, as that was the last day that PlayStation users could log on to the PSN Store to avail of the three free games (one each for PS3, PS4, and PS Vita) that EA was offering to celebrate the 20th anniversary of PlayStation.

Sony seems to be aware of these attacks, and has promised that it is going to do something about them. “We are aware of the issues some users are experiencing, and are working to address them. We’ll keep you updated,” they said.

These aren’t the first DDoS attacks on PSN either, as they have been targeted by this very group several times in the last few months. The Lizard Squad also seems to have taken issue to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, and Xbox Live in particular, promising that it will ‘end Xbox Live forever’ by Christmas.

Right.

The hacking group that have recently come into the spotlight, Lizard Squad, have once again stepped up to claim responsibility for the attacks against Sony’s PlayStation Network Servers. This attack and claim of responsibility comes after threats were made to take the Xbox Live Servers offline on December 25th.

The group has been engaging in a series of attacks against video game servers for some time now and for no discernible reason and whilst some have been using these attacks as a platform to boost their own fame, Lizard Squad seem to have no clear goal outside of mass aggravation.

They recently tweeted “PSN Login #offline #LizardSquad” but it is not yet certain whether or not the attack was a success or not with many users reporting usability. So who knows what’s going on? This does show one thing. The era of always online games can very easily be brought to a grinding halt.

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Lizard Squad, a group of hackers that have been targeting companies with DDOS attacks, have claimed responsibility for Xbox Live being down for some time today. Speaking out via their official twitter page, the group has said “Xbox Live #offline”.

Frustrating Xbox gamers internationally, Lizard Squad have been taking game services offline for  a while now and have said that their most recent attack was a holiday present for Microsoft and claimed that this is just part of a great scheme that will unfold as we get closer to Holidays.

Having in the past attacked the PSN, Destiny and a number of EA games, Lizard Squad are quickly becoming consistent with their use of the infamous DDOS attack which cripples servers temporarily. Since the attack, the service has started to come back online and some users have reported zero loss in functionality and apparently “Sony had it worse.”

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EA’s Origin servers have been the latest victim of the hacking group Lizard Squad. Players across a range of EA titles like Titanfall and Dragon Age: Inquisition have reported difficulties in logging and finding games online. That is, when they can actually get online which the vast majority of players can’t.

The official Origin Twitter recently responded to problems with the servers, stating that, “We are looking into restoring services as quickly as possible. Thank you for the heads up!”

Over the past week, Rockstar Games and Xbox Live have both been hit by DDoS attacks by Lizard Squad hackers, locking players out of games. Though the issues have since been corrected, it seems that these attacks won’t be letting up any time soon.

What are your thoughts on the hacking incidents and have you had any trouble connecting to Origin? Let us know in the comments below and stay tuned for more information.

Today, yet another another hack has occurred in the world of video games, allegedly. But it never hurts to be careful so just go on ahead and update your security information just in case. A group of hackers have claimed that they have leaked in excess of 5000 PlayStation Network, Windows Live and 2K Games accounts.

One individual claiming to represent the hackers has said, ““We have 800,000 from 2K and 500,000 credit card data. In all of our raids we have a total of around 7 million usernames and passwords. We have around 2 million Comcast accounts, 620,000 Twitter accounts, 1.2 million credentials belonging to the CIA domain, 200,000 Windows Live accounts, 3 million Facebook, 1.7 million EA origins accounts, etc.”

Now, while not trying to play the role of fear monger, the above numbers are pretty damn large. So don’t fall into the mindset of “I’ll be safe”. Seriously do go and change your security information asap and (if possible) change your security procedures as well.

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Sony wasn’t the only one suffering from DDoS attacks yesterday- Microsoft was too, as users started to report of problems with Xbox Live. The service was apparently having issues, with party chat in Diablo III and the PBS app being the only things that were really badly affected. It certainly wasn’t a network wide outage as it was with the PSN, and Microsoft appeared pretty unfazed by it, particularly as the issues were resolved pretty quickly.

Thankfully, Xbox Live now seems to be back up fully- as does PSN- although LizardCrew seem to be strutting about on Twitter, pointing out their great success in bringing both of these networks down, and taunting FBI, goading them, claiming that they can’t actually be tracked down or caught.

Yeah guys, we’ll see how it goes. You’ll all be caught pretty quickly.

Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more coverage and information, and if you experience any more network outages or issues, do let us know.

On the official game forums, the developer confirmed that, “We are currently experiencing attacks on our infrastructure that is impacting online gameplay on BF4 PC. We are working on mitigating actions.” DICE’s Ali Hassoon later confirmed the same, “We are being targeted by a DDOS, but working on fixing it ASAP. I’m sorry somebody is ruining your and my day. Rest assured we are doing our best to mitigate the situation though.”

Battlefield 4 has been plagued with a number of issues since launch, ranging from the odd (the usual glitches and bugs) to the game breaking (the CE-34878-0 Error affecting the PS4 version). DICE is currently hard at work on the same, not to mention focusing on the November 22nd release of the Xbox One version. Stay tuned for more details.

According a poster on Reddit, “DDoSing in top level league play is starting to get ridiculous. Example of the day: this party of 3 (with 2 people #1 Masters) booted our entire team and the random on their team and destroyed my internet until I reset my router. It’s such a shame when a good service is cheated like this.”

He also provided the following image below as proof:

It’s a given that everyone cheats in multiplayer somehow these days, and the mods of the game find a way to crack down on them sooner or later. However, going to this extent just for a high ranking seems a bit much for anyone. Let’s hope Treyarch preps an appropriate response to the indiscretion soon.