14 DAY TRIAL // The members of the hacker group Lizard Squad promised to leave Sony and PlayStation gaming networks alone, but in the meantime they set up a business where anyone can choose any target to bring their service down.
The tool they offer for rent is called Lizard Stresser and there are multiple subscription packages available, with monthly prices ranging from $5.99 / €4.93 for a 100-second attack to $129.99 / €107 for an eight and a half hour long denial of service incident.
Full-blown DDoS attack platform
Lifetime plans are also provided, the most expensive one reaching $500 / €411. These are valid for five years, which is what the hackers expect Lizard Stresser to last.
Of course, in order to prevent the money from being traced to the “business owners,” only Bitcoin payments are accepted; but this is only for now, as the hackers announced plans to include support for PayPal service, too.
At the moment of writing, the total power available for the entire Lizard Stresser is 600Gbps, which is half of what Lizard Squad touted to media to have hit the PSN and Xbox Live gaming networks in the attack on Christmas day.
“Welcome to LizardStresser, brought to you by Lizard Squad. This booter is famous for taking down some of the world's largest gaming networks such as XBOX Live, Playstation Network, Jagex, BattleNet, League of Legends and many more! With this stresser, you wield the power to launch some of the World's largest denial of service attacks,” it says in the dashboard of the tool’s control panel.
The administrators also set up a referral system, where 10% of whatever is spent by a referral is provided to the one making the suggestion. It seems that the money can be cashed out, too.
Previous Lizard Squad activity could have been a marketing ploy
The hackers said both on their Twitter account and in interviews to the media that, by bringing down PSN and Xbox networks, they wanted to raise awareness that the two giants are not particularly interested in protecting their services as long as money keeps flowing in.
However, with the release of Lizard Stresser, one cannot but wonder whether the actions of the hackers and their rise to fame were not actually a marketing strategy specifically intended for the promotion of this DDoS tool.
It is worth noting that Lizard Squad has already had a taste of money from their nefarious activities, when Kim Dotcom offered them a total of 3,000 premium vouchers for the Mega encrypted cloud storage service. Each is worth $99 / €81, but the hackers planned to sell them for almost half the price, which could bring them about $150,000 / €123,500.
It appears that the DDoS tool is still work in progress, as its administrators are still adding more servers. Julius Kivimäki, a self-identified member of the group, has said that the Lizards currently control about 100,000 Linux servers, which are presumably the ones the denial of service tool is using.
