Source?

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28737091

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28327117

Considering a lot of them are criminals I don't think hiring them is a common practice.

@leodarbloodline yeah this is unfortunate. The guys who do this will do jail time if caught. The FBI is exceptional at catching them.

— John Smedley (@j_smedley) August 24, 2014

Lol, a DDOS attack has nothing to do with hacking.

SHHH, this is sony's terrible servers didn;t anyone tell you? DDOS is impossible to stop, it is literally lots of communication hitting yuor server, only way top stop it is stop the servers. Can happen to anyoine.

Calm down man, I was making a joke. Can't understand basic humour, sight. And usually servers pick up on DDos and stop it. A server wouldn't usually serve 50million requests from a single point. Obviously these people knew a way to get around modern protocols of stopping DDos and had a fair few resources and know how to bring down a infrastructure that can serve tens of millions of people at once.

so it is a fault in their security because their servers continuously served empty requests that it should of picked up on. Please educate me on how it's not a fault in their security. I'm not saying it only happens to Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have probably been subjected to it at one point and xbox live is brought down without attacks (xD). 

Please learn to read humour, people on the internet aren't as ignorant as you think.

Flaming?

The ignorance in this thread is baffling.

Depending how big and sophisticated a DDoS attack is there is absolutely no way to stop it. It's just technologically impossible. Smaller attacks can be mitigated somewhat but the bigger and better they get the harder they are to stop.
Sony could dump hundreds of millions into a defense system and it still wouldn't be safe from the attacks.

So I'd rather they use their PS+ money to not go bankrupt rather than invest in security technology of greatly diminishing returns.