A group of hackers known as the 'Phantom Squad' have threatened to take both Xbox Live and PlayStation Network offline over Christmas - echoing the Lizard Squad attack which knocked both services offline last year during Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
Little is known about the group however a Twitter account claiming to be them has been issuing threats:
According to Variety the group have been sending out threats to reddit and a number of high-profile games which rely on internet servers for their multiplayer capability.
Phantom Squad's primary weapon is a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack which simply overloads a server by sending huge quantities of traffic to it.
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It's a blunt instrument but highly effective having been used in the past by Lizard Squad to take down Destiny's servers and indeed Xbox Live and PlayStation Network over Christmas.
Phantom Squad say the reason for their attacks is that both PlayStation and Xbox aren't doing enough to protect their networks, which seems a little ironic considering they wouldn't have to if hackers like Phantom Squad didn't keep trying to take them down.
Last year another group calling itself Lizard Squad attacked both PSN and Xbox Live successfully knocking them both offline on Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
The resulting attack caused a massive public backlash against both companies and it was only when Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom stepped in that he was able to persuade the hacking group to stand down.
Unsurprisingly Kim Dotcom's sympathy has now run out for both Sony and Microsoft.