Who’s in the Lizard Squad?
Summary: A group calling itself Lizard Squad took responsibility for knocking Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox networks offline on Christmas Day, and reportedly stopped only after MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom offered roughly 3,000 vouchers worth about $300,000. Krebs identifies two people tied to the attacks: Vinnie Omari, a 22-year-old from the United Kingdom who spoke to the BBC and Sky News, and Julius Kivimäki, a 16-year-old Finn arrested by Helsinki police in October 2013 on suspicion of running a botnet of more than 60,000 hacked web servers and reportedly found with over 3,000 stolen credit cards.
Why it matters: The outages were DDoS attacks, not sophisticated intrusions, and the group reportedly walked away from them for $300,000 in vouchers - a reminder that a teenager with a rented botnet can take down services used by millions, and that the price of stopping an attack can be startlingly low.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
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