Sony Corp.’s share price up, PlayStation Network back online after cyber attack, no user details accessed

The PlayStation Network of Sony Corp. was back online today after a cyber attack overloaded it, which resulted in taking it down over the weekend. No user details were accessed or stolen, the company said.

“The PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network have been impacted by an attempt to overwhelm our network with artificially high traffic,” the statement read. “We will continue to work towards fixing this issue and hope to have our services up and running as soon as possible.”

Sony said that no personal information of its subscribers had been accessed during the attack.

The “artificially high traffic” attacks, known as distributed denial of service (DDoS), are not designed to breach defenses or access hidden or encrypted information, but to disrupt activities by flooding the system with false access requests, denying access to the intended users and potentially bringing the whole system down.

A similar attack was conducted on another major gaming platform, Blizzard Entertainments Battle.net, bringing it down for several hours as well.

The cyber attacks are still being investigated by both companies. PlayStations Network has about 53 million users, while Blizzards Battle.net has about 10 million regulars.

A Twitter account with the name Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for the attack, and said that the plane, in which at the moment was Sony President John Smedley had explosives, causing it to be diverted. Smedley said in a tweet: “Yes. My plane was diverted. Not going to discuss more than that. Justice will find these guys.”

Sony Corp. was 0.90% up to close at ¥1 972 per share yesterday, marking a one-year change of +0.31% and valuing the company at ¥2.05tn (~$19.26bn). According to the Financial Times, the 18 analysts offering 12-month price targets for Sony Corp. have a median target of ¥2 050, with a high estimate of ¥3 000 and a low estimate of ¥1 360. The median estimate represents a 4.89% increase from the last price of ¥1 954.5.