Last year during Christmas Day the infamous Lizard Squad attacked and knocked Xbox Live and PlayStation Network offline. This year a threat from a copycat group calling itself “Phantom Squad” appeared on Twitter (Twitter, Inc.) alongside a promise to repeat last year’s outage by hitting gaming networks again.

Yesterday, Neowin reports that Xbox Live suffered an outage around 1:26PM PST and newly minted mayhem crew Phantom Squad took credit for the attack.

It has become a meme for Internet mayhem groups to post “#Offline” as a taunt whenever using distributed denial of service attacks to knock out a gaming service. And just to drive the point home, the Twitter account referenced the group’s earlier threat to take Xbox Live offline during the Christmas holiday.

These messages did not last long, however, as Twitter took action and suspended the Phantom Squad account shortly thereafter. Attempting to visit the group’s account page now shows a suspension notice.

“Account suspended,” the website reads. “This account has been suspended. Learn more about why Twitter suspends accounts, or return to your timeline.”

This shows an increased interest by Twitter in taking potential attackers off of their network and shutting down their claim to fame. In the past Twitter has hit other mayhem crews with suspensions, but not nearly this rapidly.

The Lizard Squad Christmas Day siege

Last year, December 25, 2014, Lizard Squad struck Xbox Live and PSN with a massive DDoS attack that knocked both offline for almost the entire day. This act has led worldwide authorities on a merry chase after Lizard Squad members continued to commit other cybercrimes leading to numerous arrests.

The Phantom Squad, along with a similar moniker, appears to have taken up the mantle of Lizard Squad in seeking to attack Xbox Live and PSN again this year during the holiday season.

Although Twitter’s move to suspend the Phantom Squad’s account will make it more difficult for them to take credit for further attacks, the group will just make a new account.

At the same time, Kim Dotcom, famous for his role in the MegaUpload copyright case decided to snipe at Microsoft and Sony in a tweet.

https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/676515075314749441

Mayhem groups such as Lizard Squad and Phantom Squad tend to target gaming services during high-volume seasons (especially the holidays) because these networks are already running at extremely high traffic. DDoS attacks rely on pushing high volumes network noise to knock servers offline and that’s far easier when sales of consoles are up and more gamers are online than any other time of the year. An analyst from research firm NPD said that November 2015 marked the best month ever in total unit sales for Xbox One, PS4 and Wii-U, surpassing sales of December and November 2014.

The notoriety of causing large scale disruption, and then getting to brag about it, also factors into why the gaming sector is more widely reported as DDoS targets by the media.

Just like every other Internet mayhem crew, Phantom Squad members will most likely face eventual arrest just like those from LulzSec and Lizard Squad.

photo credit: Ben Andreas Harding via photopin cc