Hackers Who Kicked Xbox and PlayStation Offline Are Selling Their Tools
If you're feeling inspired by the recent Xbox Live and PSN outages that spoiled Christmas for a large swath of the planet, you can now attempt a copycat attack—if you can afford it.
The lads of Lizard Squad are now peddling what looks like a very easy way to stage a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack against the target of your choice, dumping vast amounts of junk internet traffic onto unsuspecting web servers, ideally slowing them down or crashing them entirely. This is just what Lizard Squad is presumed to have done this past week, when it took down Sony and Microsoft's online gaming services for days, right as the post-Christmas crowd was eager to play.
The new service, dubbed "Lizard Stresser," is likely the same botnet (an army of hijacked computers, networked together) the Lizards used to attack Xbox and PSN. You can gain temporary access to this highly disruptive tool starting at just $3 (for a 100 second attack), with pricing options increasing as you tick up the attack's duration—an eight hour strike will set you back $70.
Without correct power distribution, if you hit a home connection right now, you'll drop the entire city.
— R.I.U. Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) December 30, 2014
The Lizard Stresser service would be yet another deeply (stupidly?) bold publicity move by the Lizard Squad, just days after one of its purported members gave a TV interview. Attacking two of the biggest corporations in the world on Christmas morning is already a pretty quick way to get the FBI in your front yard—openly selling that ability to anyone (via PayPal!) is something of an internet death wish.
Photo: Getty