Lizard Squad is back: Xbox Live and Daybreak Games Company face DDoS battering
The great Christmas Day siege of Xbox and PlayStation doesn’t seem to be enough for notorious Internet mayhem group Lizard Squad who have continued their campaign of denial of service attacks against gaming companies. The crew is back and has claimed credit for DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attacks against Xbox Live and the newly minted Daybreak Games Company (formerly known as Sony Online Entertainment.)
So far, the group has pre-announced its attacks to Twitter and then posted a victory tweet claiming success with each bombardment.
H1Z1 #offline
— Lizard Squad (@LizardPhoenix) February 14, 2015
Friday, Daybreak Games announced that its multiplayer servers—including its zombie survival game H1Z1–were suffering under heavy traffic and it was affecting gameplay. Not too soon afterwards Lizard Squad’s Twitter account posted “H1Z1 #offline.”
Xbox (360) Live #offline — Lizard Squad (@LizardPhoenix) February 16, 2015
Monday, Lizard Squad posted “Xbox (360) Live #offline.” This coincided with complaints from gamers trying to use the Xbox Live service, who experienced glitches in the platform including friend’s lists not functioning. The Xbox Live status at the time also warned that service was limited.
The mayhem crew is tweeting presently under the moniker @LizardPhoenix, presumably because Twitter has been closing previous Lizard Squad accounts or for some sort of counter-intelligence to prevent discovery by authorities or enemy hacker groups.
Ruining Christmas was not enough
Lizard Squad gained infamy last year by shutting down Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network for most of Christmas Day. During the attacks the group used a massive botnet to flood both services with tremendous amounts of data that caused the services to go offline, meaning that newly unwrapped PlayStation 4s and Xbox Ones could not connect to the service and gamers could not play games.
In an attempt to get the mayhem group to stop, Kim Dotcom, of MegaUpload fame, offered the crew free vouchers to his encrypted file storage service Mega. The group briefly ceased their attacks but quickly went back to committing mayhem.
And now they have another message for Kim Dotcom via Twitter:
One more thing: Tell KimDotcom to take his vouchers and shove them up his fat ass.
— Lizard Squad (@LizardPhoenix) February 16, 2015
After the Christmas Day attacks, Lizard Squad unveiled a DDoS-for-hire website, the Lizard Stresser. It has been thought that much of the attacks leading up to and including the Christmas attacks had been part of an elaborate marketing scheme to raise awareness for the service.
Already there have been two arrests thought to be members of Lizard Squad or related to the mayhem group. First is the arrest of Vinnie Omari, a 22-year-old British citizen, during a raid December 29, 2014. Then, another teen was arrested by a U.K. law enforcement agency on January 16, 2015.
However, these arrests have not stopped the group from continuing to ignite attacks.
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