Why Lizard Squad Took Down PSN and Xbox Live On Christmas Day

DroidJason1 writes Early Christmas morning, hacker group Lizard Squad took credit for taking down PlayStation Network and Xbox Live for hours. This affected those who had received new Xbox One or PS4 consoles, preventing them from playing online. So why did they do it? According to an exclusive interview with Lizard Squad, it had to do with convincing companies to improve their security — the hard way. "Taking down Microsoft and Sony networks shows the companies' inability to protect their consumers and instead shows their true vulnerability. Lizard Squad claims that their actions are simple, take down gaming networks for a short while, and forcing companies to upgrade their security as a result."

Comments

Re:They're assholes.

[JackieBrown]

So they just gave you time to think about your game consumption, and the opportunity to think about the "silent" in silent night.

They stopped because they were paid off. Thinking of them as noble or anything less than assholes gives them to much credit.

https://twitter.com/LizardMafi...

Lizard Squad @LizardMafia 10h 10 hours ago
Thanks @KimDotcom for the vouchers--you're the reason we stopped the attacks. @MegaPrivacy is an awesome service.

Re: For that, you'd have to do a different attack

[beanpoppa]

I don't think you understand how amplification attacks work. Anti-spoofing measures don't do anything. The spoofed messages don't come into your network. The very large responses do. And by the time they reach your filters, the damage is done; they've already filled your pipes. As the patent said, it's not exposing a weakness on your system. It's exposing a weakness on third party DNS servers, and the hundreds/thousands/millions of peoples' PCs that have been controlled via botnet.

Re: They're assholes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi. You are dumb. Very dumb. Now, being a moron, you probably don't realize just how dumb you are, so I won't hold it against you. But now that I have informed you that you are stupid, you now have a responsibility to not go around talking about things you are ignorant about (likely everything).

Simply because something is not physical does not make it not real. And, in actuality this "attack" was as physical as a door. Routers are physical, switches are physical, computers are physical even if their OS has been virtualized. And the services they provide are just as real as the doctors' services behind a door at the physician's office.

So distinguishing between a DDOS attach and blocking a door is rather stupid and you should feel shame by bringing up such a ridiculous argument. Go stand in the corner, child.

Re:They're assholes.

[Penguinisto]

Plus their benefit vs harm ratio is kinda crap. Any idiot knows that online game stuff is vulnerable to DDOS. It's normally not a big problem because there doesn't seem to be enough money for most attackers to DDOS such stuff regularly. Most of them probably want more than vouchers from Kim Dotcom. So you cause a problem now and you don't really reduce future problems.

Whereas it seems lots of people actually didn't know the bad and evil things their governments were doing, and Assange and Snowden opened at least some of their eyes. Greater awareness of that is a step towards eventually reducing the bad stuff. It may not actually fix stuff (people might still not care), but what other better options and paths are there?

Quoted complete for greater exposure. You should have posted this under a 'nym or login, because it needs to be modded way the fuck up. :)

Re:They're assholes.

[BarbaraHudson]

True, but they can always send their current ip address to their friend via email, chat, text, or a phone call. Or run a small server that people can join up to independent of the game companies, just to get the other players IPs.