Lizard Sqaud fried Sony's servers over Christmas.

Crabber85 · Post by **Crabber85** » Tue Dec 30, 2014 9:05 am

This hacker group known as Lizard Squad has been messing with the PSN and Xbox Live networks for weeks now and have caused sporadic service for both networks and even outages lasting days starting back in the summer and even made a promise to take both networks down for good on Christmas day and they tried unfortunately for them Microsoft kind of saw the attack coming and forcibly shut their Xbox Live service down for maintenance to protect their servers but Sony let it happen and their service got shut down around 12 pm EST here on the East coast and because they let the attack happen and even tried to keep it under wraps while they attempted to stop it the attack fried their servers permanently burning them out completely crippling the PSN and Sony online services and at the time of writing this I have not been able to find proof that Sony has gotten their backup servers up and online.I was however able to find some more interesting information apparently another Hacker group called Finest Squad actually went after Lizard Squad for what it was doing and leaked a bunch of personally identifying information on them and now several members of Lizard Squad have been arrested by the FBI for felony tampering among other things.Anonymous even got in on the action threating to work with the FBI to find the guys from Lizard Squad responsible so that they could be arrested and brought up on charges this has resulted in a white flag being waved by Lizard Squad because they know that they have gone too far and have angered the wrong people.

Nnnnnnnn · Post by **Nnnnnnnn** » Tue Dec 30, 2014 3:12 pm

Meanwhile I was playing online on Super Smash Bros on my "inferior" (according to PS4/XB1 fanboys) Wii U, with not a care in the world.

Keg · Post by **Keg** » Tue Dec 30, 2014 4:01 pm

http://alterslash.org/#article-6577287Lizard Squad: Xbox Live, PSN Attacks Were a 'Marketing Scheme' For DDoS ServiceThe devastating Christmas Day attacks against the gaming networks of Sony and Microsoft were a marketing scheme for a commercial cyberattack service, according to the hackers claiming responsibility for the attacks. Known as Lizard Squad, the hacker collective says it shut down the PlayStation Network (PSN) and Xbox Live network on Dec. 25 using a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, a common technique that overloads servers with data requests. The powerful attacks rendered the networks unusable for days, infuriating gamers around the world and causing yet-untold losses of revenue. Now, members of Lizard Squad say the group is selling the DDoS service they used against Sony and Microsoft to anyone willing to pay.

Crabber85 · Post by **Crabber85** » Wed Dec 31, 2014 1:33 pm

@Keg, it doesn't surprise me that this was a marketing scheme but three members of the group have been found and arrested according to the Huffington Post.The FBI have been looking into the matter since these attacks began around six months ago and were finally able to nab a few of the men responsible and are still looking for more of them.The group may be able to sell this DDOS attack program now that it has been proven to work but at what cost to them????A DDOS or Distributed Denial of Service attack is basically the same thing as a DOS or Denial of Service attack with one difference it's setup to target multiple zones or ISP numbers that any given network may use to tie all of its different services together in a service network instead a specific zone or ISP number which makes it harder to stop and harder to prevent.DOS attacks happen regularly in multi-player gaming like Battlefield or Call of Duty because each players ISP info is visible on the network everybody else can theoretically see it and spam it to prevent it from connecting to the internet this is essentially what Lizard Squad did but they went on a much larger scale spamming all the ISP numbers that Xbox Live and PSN use to host the different games, apps and services that they have available and spamming all these points in each network they effectively created a digital traffic jam where there was more useless information hitting the servers for each service component than the servers could handle this in turn caused everybody to loose access.The way this kind of attack is carried out is that a server query is sent by multiple computers to the same server where each computer is asking for a reply but because the server can't answer fast enough or with any relevant information the queries keep coming in faster stacking up which congests the traffic lanes eventually causing the server to shut down or be fried because it is so overloaded.This takes time and lots of computers spamming at one time so in theory what their program does is set more computers up as bots with one key command which is to send queries and have no response time delay so that a constant stream of these calls keep coming from the computers to the server eventually any server will succumb to this kind of attack unless a multi query drop protocol is engaged which causes the server to stop receiving these invalid information requests all together which again in theory should stop the attack in its tracks.The old school way of doing a DDOS attack was to send out a virus such as a Trojan into the wild infecting as many websites and system updates as possible yielding a higher machine or computer infection rate and once the machine was infected the Trojan would then initiate a download of other infections which would re-code the start up menu, HKCU entries and Registry turning the computer into a remote controlled bot which would then be used to send out spam to any given service to shut it down this process takes a long time because it is completely depended upon numerous computers being infected which could take days to weeks or even months back then.Now the game has changed with the advent of current anti-virus and anti-malware programs getting this bot infection onto peoples systems is extremely hard so the bad guys have turned to using their own community to do the dirty work because they are growing in numbers each year they have the physical presence now to do these things and to target bigger and bigger services which is unfortunate but as it has been said before with each leap the bad guys take the good guys are forced to take one as well to keep up so don't be surprised if a new anti-dos or anti-ddos program comes out in the near future.

Laurie LeAnn · Post by **Laurie LeAnn** » Fri Jan 02, 2015 4:19 am

I am so glad I don't play those things

Crabber85 · Post by **Crabber85** » Fri Jan 02, 2015 8:35 am

@Laurie, yeah sometimes being a gamer can be a pain in the behind and it doesn't matter which console you use or even if your only playing on the computer or tablet the world of online game play is riddled with problems.I know you'll remember the Farm-ville outage back in 2012 where the whole service went down for days because somebody had taken the liberty of inserting a virus into the game which infected the games servers and also infected a lot of peoples computers when they tried to play the game, FB had to shut the game down and do a full cleaning and even issued a public apology for the inconvenience.People who play games like Farm-Ville and Candy Crush Saga make up about 50% of the online gamer base at this point because a lot of people who'd either never played on a console or had and wanted something else started playing these free to play games on social media sites because they are colorful, rewarding and extremely addicting.Sony has been able to restore their PSN service but from what I've read they are still experiencing some lingering after effects from the attack.

Laurie LeAnn · Post by **Laurie LeAnn** » Mon Jan 05, 2015 3:15 pm

I quit playing candy crush cause I can't beat this one level and I will not pay for a life. I don't think anyone plays farmville around here. We banned it from our comp at the library because of the viruses. I blocked it on my personal comp. I'm about ready to block candy crush so I won't get all these notifications, send me lives....!