Recent global outages to Xbox Live were apparently down to the work of New World Hackers, an online group with a penchant for taking down websites. They claim they could wipe Xbox Live “from the face of the Earth”.
New World Hackers have previously carried out attacks on everybody’s favourite racist haircut Donald Trump, and websites associated with ISIS. Understandable targets, the pair of ’em – but why go for our sweet videogames?
It is about time XBOX dies.@XboxSupport @XBOX @KEEMSTAR
Enjoy the outage..
Half of U.S #OFFLINE
All of Europe #OFFLINE#NwHackers— New World Hackers (@NewWorldHacking) February 22, 2016
As it turns out, NWH’s latest campaign is a form of protest against major corporations having shitty security protection.
A member of New World Hackers told Newsweek:
Well, didn’t even take as long as I thought. We attacked Xbox to protest. Major companies like this have massive servers but no real protection. We want Xbox to update the protection they have, which isn’t much.
NWH have said this attack is just a little demo of what they can do. The group have previously been credited with the largest distributed denial of service (Ddos) attack ever carried out. The result was all of the BBC’s websites being taken offline for several hours back in December 2015.
Our busy little hackers also claimed responsibility for attacks on the Xbox Live network last January, which actually coaxed Snoop Dogg to emerge from his usual cloud of recreational drugs to tell Bill Gates to “sort his shit out” over Instagram. Yeah Bill, pull your finger out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3_EaRP0oak
Microsoft have since confirmed that all services are now back online. A moment of silence for anyone who happened to be in the middle of a lengthy download.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.