Finn Linked To Lizard Squad Christmas Attack

An anonymous reader writes Security researcher Mikko Hyppönen from F-Secure told the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat and Finland's MTV news that rumours have been circulating for several months about the Lizard Squad group of hackers who say they disrupted the two computer games console networks on Christmas Day. He confirmed that at least one of them is a Finn. One of the hackers, in a Skype interview from Finland by Britain's Sky News, said that the attack was carried out for amusement and to expose security flaws in the networks. Hyppönen told Helsingin Sanomat and MTV that his company has been aware of the hacker group for several months. 'According to our information, the group has members in the United States, Canada, England and at least one member in Finland,' he told MTV. The nationalities of other members that participated in the Christmas attack have not been confirmed. Hyppönen noted that these kinds of groups come and go, and that their members are usually young.

Comments

Erm

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when did DDOS utilise a security flaw?

Re:Erm

[Zocalo]

The two are not mutually exclusive, especially if the effect of the security flaw is compounded by multiple connections, for instance being able to use the exploit to turn a child process into a zombie and another child to be spawned until resources are exhausted. There's two security flaws there; the ability for a remote client to zombify the children and not having a cap on the maximum number of children in the config.

Re: Erm

[Anonymous Coward]

They did a 1.2 tb bandwidth crack that is 3x's larger than last time. They claim to control routers on some major pipelines. Those sir, are security flaws.

ORLY!

[camg188]

No mention in TFA about how they determined this guy was in the Lizard Squad except that he claims to be.
"Rumors have been circulating", but no mention about what the rumors are or if they were involved with identifying this hacker.
Hey, but if it's on Finland's MTV then it must be true. But why is my skeptical sense tingling?

Re:ORLY!

[Anonymous Coward]

Despite its name, MTV is not the music television that you know, but a respected TV channel and news agency.

Profile of the perps:

[BarbaraHudson]

Hyppönen noted that these kinds of groups come and go, and that their members are usually young.

This is to be expected, as the perps have xbox and playstation accounts, have probably gotten a few bans for cheating, or even kicked off the networks, and have a disproportionate sense of self-entitlement.

That should help narrow it down to a few million suspects.

Re:Profile of the perps:

[Rashdot]

They could also be Finnish Thin Lizzy fans.

A computer security engineer's non hackable gifts

[mallyn]

I am a computer security engineer where I work.

However, in my own personal life, I am just plain very old fashioned.

I made each family member a gortex rain jacket by hand, using a non-computerized sewing machine.

People say this is old fashioned, considering that I work with computers every day.

Well, now I can say to them that my gifts cannot be hacked or DDOS'd.

Well, that's vague

[wonkey_monkey]

Finn Linked To Lizard Squad Christmas Attack

Also he was a guy and is likely to have two legs.

Is it bad that my first thought was that it was the guy from Tron?