14 DAY TRIAL // Amidst reports from undisclosed official sources and speculations that the Sony hack had been carried out with help from inside the company, a member of the Lizard Squad hacker group said that the outfit was involved indirectly in the incident.
On December 19, the FBI concluded that the government of North Korea had been behind the attack on Sony, but US officials close to the investigation have said recently that hackers outside the country may have been contracted to carry out the deed.
Not everyone agrees with the FBI's conclusion
Some security experts have been vocal about the fact that the law enforcement agency presented no solid proof to support its conclusion.
In a separate investigation, Norse, a US-based security company that provides early warning systems for cyber-attack prevention, determined that Guardians of Peace, the hackers claiming the attack on Sony, had at least six members, two of them being from the US and three from Canada, Thailand, and Singapore.
“The disclosure casts further doubt on the FBI’s assertion that the attack was carried out by state-sponsored actors under the control of North Korea, a theory that has been all but discredited by a host of security professionals over the last week, including former federal prosecutor Mark Rasch,” said Anthony Freed from Norse.
Lizard Squad's involvement in the Sony hack
In an interview with Washington Post, one Lizard Squad member taking the alias Ryan Cleary (the name of a LulzSec member) said that the group knew some of the individuals that operated under the name of Guardians of Peace (GOP) and helped them compromise the Sony computer network.
The Lizards claim that they provided log-in credentials of two Sony employees to GOP, which helped with the initial hack into the company networks.
If this is true, then the theory that the perpetrators (hackers or North Korea) had inside help crumbles down.
Hackers launch their own DDoS tool
Lizard Squad started to capture the attention of the media in late August 2014, when they initiated a DDoS attack against Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) and PSN services. That incident also included a bomb scare targeting the plane carrying SOE president John Smedley from Dallas to San Diego.
In more recent news, the hacker group launched a denial of service attack on PSN and Xbox on Christmas day, and stopped it when Kim Dotcom offered them 3,000 free vouchers, each worth $99 / €81, for the Mega encrypted cloud service.
Despite claiming that all this was done just to point out how insecure the systems of the two gaming services were, Lizard Squad launched yesterday their own DDoS tool, called Lizard Stresser, which can be used by anyone to disrupt the activity of any online target, for a monthly fee.