SOE’s John Smedley’s plane diverted after DDoS hacker bomb threat

The DDoS attacks continued today and there was some rather alarming news concerning a flight carrying SOE president John Smedley.

Today the Playstation Network was targeted for DDoS attacks, the latest in a spate of attacks over the past 48 hours from a group going by the name of the Lizard Sqaud. Events got a little more serious when an American Airlines flight (flight 362) carrying SOE president John Smedley was diverted to Phoenix following a claim by the Lizard Squad hacking group that there were explosives on board. The FBI were subsequently called in to investigate.

Smedley confirmed the aircraft’s diversion on a Tweet.

Awesome. Flight diverted to Phoenix for security reasons.

— John Smedley (@j_smedley) August 24, 2014

Yes. My plane was diverted. Not going to discuss more than that. Justice will find these guys.

— John Smedley (@j_smedley) August 24, 2014

FBI searches baggage from the flight.

The Lizard Squad group posted the following messages on Twitter prior to the diversion alerting American Airlines to “plane #362 from DFW to SAN has explosives on-board” and that they should “look into this”.

https://twitter.com/LizardSquad/status/503613146091630592

Local news hopped on the case and reported from the scene and passengers explained that the pilot had informed them there was a security breach in the cargo section of the plane.

The Playstation Network confirmed the DDoS attacks in a blog update earlier:

Like other major networks around the world, the PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network have been impacted by an attempt to overwhelm our network with artificially high traffic.
Although this has impacted your ability to access our network and enjoy our services, no personal information has been accessed. We will continue to work towards fixing this issue and hope to have our services up and running as soon as possible.

There has been no further comment on the diversion but the incident could have occurred as Smedley had announced his flight plan on Twitter prior to boarding which was probably not the smartest move.