DayBreak CEO Suffers Retribution After Threatening Hacker

This will be a bit of a mess, so hold onto your hats and prepare to take notes.

SO!

Last Christmas, PSN and Xbox Live were down for extended periods of time, preventing people from logging onto their accounts, thus, delaying Christmas for many people who had received Xbox One’s, PS4’s, or digital copies of their anticipated holiday game. It was cleared up after a few days, but it was a major annoyance, and claiming responsibility for that attack was the Lizard Squad: a group of hacking trolls with apparently no agenda other than irritating gamers. It worked.

Now, despite their claims of being ‘untouchable’, recently a Finnish teenager was linked to the organization, and prosecutors were able to peg him for crimes such as fraud and security breaches, but his sentence was unusually light: a two year sentence that involved zero prison time, as well as having his internet activities closely monitored. A pretty light sentence, compared to his crimes.

Now, you may be familiar with DayBreak Games. They are a formerly Sony-owned developer behind games like Planetside 2 and H1Z1, who are avid, passionate enemies of cheaters, hackers, and other kinds of internet scoundrels… in fact, they hate them perhaps a little more than they reasonably should.



And no one in DayBreak games hates hackers more than one John Smedley, Daybreak CEO and Internet Batman, who was so outraged over the leniency of the sentencing that he went on a Twitter tirade about how unfair it was and the seriousness of this Finnish teenager’s crimes.
 

“I’m extremely angry that the Finnish justice system chose to let Julius Kivimaki off with a 2 year suspended sentence. This guy is the worst kind of bad news. He’s been involved for years in every kind of terrible thing you can imagine including Carding, hacking, swatting people all over the world. He’s also participated in a major way in DDOS attacks that caused a lot of grief for gamers and a lot of economic damage to the companies that make and run games.”

But he didn’t end at complaining. He took things a step further by outright threatening this teenager and his parents, saying he would sue them and, I quote, ”I’m coming for you”.

Well, it seems he finally pushed too far, because Lizard Squad decisively pushed back, and since his Twitter Tirade, DayBreak Games has been burdened by constant DDoS attacks, both on H1Z1 and PlanetSide 2. While DayBreak Games have claimed they now have the situation under control, I find that very unlikely—these things happen in waves, and if it really is Lizard Squad responsible (which seems overwhelmingly likely, but to be fair they haven’t claimed as much yet) then this is just the first wave of many. So, I wouldn’t make any plans with your PC this evening, if you had a hankering for Planetside 2.

Now, I hate hackers as much as the next guy, but I feel as if this is almost just desserts. Not to excuse what our hacker friend has done, but a CEO should be slightly more composed and professional than to make threats over Twitter, especially to two people (his parents) who had nothing to do with it.

I very much doubt, however, this is the last we’ll hear of this.