14 DAY TRIAL // After two weeks of playing shenanigans to gamers, Lizard Squad hacker group announces an early retirement, stating that their purpose has been fulfilled.
The group has come to media attention after playing a cat and mouse game with high-profile actors in the gaming industry by disrupting their services, plucking the nerves of many players.
Lizard Squad started their offensive by targeting Sony’s Online Entertainment (SOE) and PSN services in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and creating a bomb scare that caused the plane carrying John Smedley, SOE president, to be diverted to the airport of a different city than the one it was supposed to land on initially.
They also aimed, among others, at the online services provided by Blizzard and Twitch, a gamer-oriented broadcast platform stirring up the gaming community all over the world.
In a message left on anonymous publishing service Pastebin, the group says that the original motivation behind the attacks was to see if their skills were good enough to allow them to get away with the deeds without getting caught.
“Originally it was to see if we could evade being caught and to experience the raw thrill of anarchy, not being bound to phony laws,” the announcement reads.
They admitted that the motivation changed throughout “this adventure,” whose purpose was “to cause havoc within the gaming community.”
Rumor has it that the FBI, which started an investigation on their activity, managed to catch them, although their website says that the team was not arrested.
Lizard Squad followers were left confuzzled, though, as a tweet from the collective informed that two of the team members, Komodo and Iguana, have been arrested by the authorities.
However, the FBI may be close to identifying and catching them, and the Pastebin message could be just an attempt to throw law enforcement off the track.
What remains behind are the gamers frustrated that they could not connect to the desired games and nothing could be done.
Leaving aside the damage done by the hacker unit, it is clear that businesses in the gaming industry need to increase the security of their systems and adopt mitigation solutions that would maintain their systems running in case of a DDoS.
In this case, the eight-member Lizard Squad managed to disrupt the services of a major game provider, apparently without suffering any consequences. They claim to be just a group of friends with a single mission in mind: “cause a lot of havoc without legal repercussions.”
If this is true, motivated attackers bent on stealing user information from the affected systems could pose a much greater risk.