Xbox head Phil Spencer has revealed that his company, Sony, and Nintendo are joining forces to combat the recent wave of DDoS attacks.
What’s a DDoS attack?
It stands for “distributed denial-of-service,” and in clearer terms, it’s when an individual or a group (usually using a botnet of some kind) flood a system with fake traffic in order to overload its resources. As recently as last Christmas, a hacker group known as Lizard Squad brought down PSN and Xbox Live for nearly two days.
What do Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo want to do about it?
It’s clearly a big problem for any game company providing an online service (especially a paid one like Live and PSN), but they aren’t ready to reveal any specific plans just yet. So far, all we know is that discussions are taking place on how to handle the issue, but it’s a good first step that all three of them are recognizing the severity of the problem.
Why would they work together on this? Aren’t they competitors?
Speaking to GameInformer, Spencer said that none of them benefit when any of the others goes down.
“I don’t think it’s great when PSN goes down. It doesn’t help me,” he stated.
“All it does is put the fear and distrust from any gamer that’s out there, so I look at all of us together as this is our collective opportunity to share what we can about what we’re learning and how things are growing. Those conversations happen, which I think is great.”
