Both Sony’s PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox Live have still not recovered from being down for most part of Christmas day and the following Boxing Day for most of their users. While the highly motivated Hacking collective, the Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility of this outage.
This group has been in on the news for most part of the year as it has on multiple occasions attacked the gaming networks. Mind you this wasn’t the first time they hit Sony or Microsoft as well. They have claimed to have hit the PlayStation network in August and Xbox in early December, as well as several others such as RiotGames’ League of Legends and Blizzard’s Battle.net.
Along with those hacks, the group pulled off some serious pranks as well. The group’s twitter account tweeted out a bomb scare, forcing an American Airlines flight to make an emergency landing. On board was Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley. This incident put Lizard Squad right amongst the top sights of the FBI.
They didn’t stop at that either, claiming to have planted the ISIS flag on Sony’s servers.
Well tweeting about a bomb threat is a serious federal crime, but security experts are of the view that Lizard Squad’s actual motives were amusement and pranks and they also stated that they might have nothing to do with ISIS as well.
But when it comes to hacking, Lizard Squad understands what it’s getting at. An analyst warned this week that the group is “not to be trifled with. Let me say this about Lizard Squad. My personal opinion is, those guys know what they’re doing, and if they’re coming after you, you’re going to have a bad day,” said Dan Holden, director of research at the IT analysis firm Arbor Networks.
Lizard Squad’s premier weapon of choice is Distributed Denial of Service attacks, or DDoS attacks, which overwhelm servers with massive amounts of fake traffic, rendering them inoperable.