How Lizard Squad Stole Christmas

[Vivi22]

Sony and Microsoft would have to be even dumber than I already think they are to either not plan for an influx of new customers at Christmas, or to vastly underestimate how much traffic their servers would see.

This would be a more compelling argument if it weren't for the fact that virtually every popular game sees server overload at release.

Big difference between planning for server demand on the release of a new game and planning for server demand on a console when you have about ten years of experience with selling online consoles at Christmas and know what the sales have been leading into it. Never even mind sales, you know what you've shipped, how fast things have been selling, and you charge money for your services specifically to help pay for the server capacity.

I might be able to buy one of their services going down over Christmas simply due to Christmas day server load. It's extremely unlikely, but I could see it happening to one of them. But not both.

 

[CaitSeith]

Anybody else guessing that the networks just failed under Christmas morning pressure and there wasn't any significant DDOS at all? The suits have little incentive to admit culpability when they can just point at the sort of low level attacks they probably endure on a daily basis anyway.

Why would they cover it? Every time their servers are down because of overload, they admit it. I see very few reasons for this time being different.

 

[RandV80]

Sony and Microsoft would have to be even dumber than I already think they are to either not plan for an influx of new customers at Christmas, or to vastly underestimate how much traffic their servers would see.

This would be a more compelling argument if it weren't for the fact that virtually every popular game sees server overload at release.

Not really. There can be multiple reasons for a spike in traffic on a console. Maybe it's Christmas, maybe it's a new Halo, or a number of other reasons. Also you expect your install base to keep growing, so you want your servers to keep up.

The problem with an online game launching is you're going to get your biggest load right at the very start but then except for rare exceptions they will never need that server capacity ever again. Depending on the publisher/developer that can be a very difficult call to make, you don't want the embarrassment & bad publicity, but you don't want to spend millions on extra server capacity that will only be used for the first week.

In most cases taking the embarrassment is probably the lesser of two evils. Like the guy above mentioned, the launch of Diablo 3 was shit but he still came back to play it.

 

[RedEyesBlackGamer]

...significant DDOS...

So chances are there was an actual DDOS.

Sure, but there basically always is. If it hadn't been there, would the servers still have faltered under legitimate demand?

I wouldn't put it past Sony. The Xbox Live had outages at times, but the PSN folded like a house of cards. If there was a DDOS, that tells me that the PSN can barely handle the demand during peak times. If there wasn't a DDOS, it shows once again how utterly inept management of the PSN is.

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

That story about Disney Infinity not working combined with the fact that the executives and marketers really are not in touch with the reality of the technology they sell is very chilling. It took a massive backdraft to get MS to drop the Xbone's stupid phone home every 24 hrs DRM, a backlash that should have come from inside the company before the public ever watched the official announcement back in early 2013.

I don't even think they will ever learn. Wasn't Ubisoft's, and others', always online DRM games often attacked on launch by botnets or put under way too much strain to work? Ubi finally backed down somewhat (and cursed us with Uplay to make up for coming to their senses). Then MS tried it and thankfully failed to even bring it to market. Then many still make things too reliant on distant servers when it's unnecessary.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Oh CLEARLY we're ready for that inevitable "always online" future. How could we ever come to question it? Pffft.

Those Christmas Day DDoS attacks? Tame. Just a taste of the potential future.

Most people (especially those clamoring for the "convenience" of always-online services) have no real grasp of just how big the internet has become, how incredibly vulnerable most of it is, how easy it is to build a botnet, and how easy it is to disrupt even large distributed services with a relatively tiny fraction of hosts.

Between growing civil unrest and consolidation of targets (bigger is better, in the hacker's eyes), my professional opinion would be to expect such attacks to become more frequent.

 

[fix-the-spade]

Trouble is, for all the service outages and embarrassment none of these always online services are 'failing' from a corporate stand point.

PSN has gone from free to subscription, it and Xbox Live continue to grow. Origin (has an offline mode thank goodness), Uplay and plenty of online dependent games are not only being released, but succeeding in terms of the short terms sales boards value so highly.

I don't see this DDoS or any other ones having a lasting effect beyond becoming accepted as a fact of life, people are starting to think they 'need' to be online all the time and they seem to be convinced by the blurb that it's inescapable that service outages will brick their games. This has happened repeatedly to multiple services now, the subscriptions and the DLC sales keep rolling in unabated.

I really think it will take either massive (truly massive, as in hundred of million of dollars taken from each publisher repeatedly) litigation or legislation to change the direction games from the big publishers are going in, or a complete crash in their market. All of which seem unlikely.

 

[uncanny474]

Anybody else guessing that the networks just failed under Christmas morning pressure and there wasn't any significant DDOS at all? The suits have little incentive to admit culpability when they can just point at the sort of low level attacks they probably endure on a daily basis anyway.

I'll see your corporate bullshit and raise you one conspiracy theory. I think Sony and/or Microsoft was *behind* the attack. Probably Microsoft; they have a history of hiding shoddy products behind legal ambiguity instead of admitting to it. Anyway, Microsoft knows its network and netcode is terrible. They see the sales figures coming in that they know will kill their servers, and they decide to play a little prank. In the next security updates to Windows (and possibly Xbone too), they add the DDOS code, then launch the attack and make the "Lizard Squad" facade or partner with a legit online group to throw off the scent. The group gets notoriety and arguably some money (and the free Dotcom accounts) and Microsoft makes sure that A) nobody's blaming them for their servers going down and B) that Sony is being affected just as much. The DDOS is launched from a Lizard Squad computer so nobody's the wiser.

 

[Endominus]

Anybody else guessing that the networks just failed under Christmas morning pressure and there wasn't any significant DDOS at all? The suits have little incentive to admit culpability when they can just point at the sort of low level attacks they probably endure on a daily basis anyway.

I'll see your corporate bullshit and raise you one conspiracy theory. I think Sony and/or Microsoft was *behind* the attack. Probably Microsoft; they have a history of hiding shoddy products behind legal ambiguity instead of admitting to it...

I see your conspiracy theory and raise you insanely convoluted and improbable turns of events; the PS4 and Xbone don't even exist - they're actually just Raspberry Pis dressed up in holograms created by a race of English reptoids ("Lizard Squad" - see? Reptoids because they're lizards, and English because of the unnecessary 'u' that they add to all their words) to distract the gaming public from their attempts to secure natural gas deposits in the Arctic ocean from the glorious USSR. The Christmas day attack was coordinated to encourage the Christmas spirit (due to a typical reptoid misunderstanding of the message of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas"), and they are relying on our feelings of warmth and good cheer to all things to allow them to complete their sinister plans on Earth.

Thankfully, we are evolved past the naive and gullible Whos, with their tragically stunted understanding of economics, entitlement, and malice, and can spent as much time as we have hours assigning blame, complaining, and demanding recompense for the utter hell of being unable to access our digital media during these short few days we have with our families.