(Reuters) — British police said on Friday they had arrested a man in northwest England following the 2014 cyber attacks on Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox systems.
Both systems suffered long outages over Christmas after a major distributed denial of service attack. A hacking group calling itself Lizard Squad, which had attacked the two networks earlier last year, claimed responsibility.
“Officers ... have arrested a man in Southport, Merseyside this morning as part of an investigation into ‘swatting’ and computer hacking offenses,” Merseyside police said in a statement.
The officers had worked closely with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation in the operation, it added.
No further details of the arrest were immediately available.
Swatting is a term used to describe criminal activity by an individual or group who provide false information to law enforcement agencies in the United States, suggesting that a threat exists at a particular location so that police respond with tactical units.
Zurich America Insurance Co. is not obligated to cover Sony Corp. of America for litigation related to the 2011 hacking of its PlayStation Network, said a New York judge in a bench ruling.