PlayStation Offers Holiday 'Thank You' After Lizard Squad Attack

— -- Precious holiday gaming time was lost after Sony's PlayStation network was hit by an attack, and now the company is offering to make it up to gamers.

PlayStation Plus members who had a trial or active membership when the network outage first hit on Christmas will receive an automatic extension of five days, Eric Lempel, vice president of Sony Network Entertainment, wrote in a blog post.

Sony also plans to give gamers a one-time 10 percent discount code to use this month on content in the PlayStation store. Lempel said details of how gamers can take advantage of the discount will be announced sometime this month.

Microsoft's Xbox Live and Sony's PlayStation Network both suffered “distributed denial of service” attacks over Christmas perpetrated by a hacker group called the Lizard Squad.

The attacks are designed to flood the networks with artificial traffic, ultimately disrupting connectivity and knocking the systems offline for thousands of gamers around the world.

Lizard Squad, a mysterious hacking collective that seems to choose its targets for the "fun" of it, tweeted that it was responsible for the attack. The group has since come out with a website offering subscriptions to its DDoS tool to take down websites for as little as a few dollars per month.

The service, called the "Stresser" is currently down, with the group tweeting that it is in the process of switching servers.