14 DAY TRIAL // Despite being very vocal on Twitter about their personal details being safe from public disclosure, at least one Lizard Squad member has appeared in an on-camera interview and has been identified to be part of the hacker group.
Lizard Squad carried out a massive denial of service (DoS) attack on Christmas day against Xbox Live and PlayStation gaming networks, disrupting connectivity for millions of users.
Lizards claim to be undoxable
Their goal was not financially motivated, but to raise awareness that these giant services were making millions without thinking to invest in equipment to keep their services protected.
They believe that the two companies are now doing upgrades for their equipment in order to stop this type of attacks in the future.
The attack was stopped the moment Kim Dotcom promised the group 3,000 lifetime vouchers for the MegaUpload service.
Many other groups tried to reveal the identity of the Lizard Squad members, but it appears that their efforts were futile, only fueling claims of “undoxability,” which were repeated multiple times on Twitter.
Yesterday, R.I.U. was added to the name of the account, which stands for Resting In Undoxability.
One Lizard shows himself on camera
However, over the weekend, Sky News released a video interview with an individual called Ryan, who is allegedly part of the Lizard Squad group. Further digging online revealed that his name was Julius Kivimäki, from Finland.
He has said that at the moment the group has access to about 100,000 Linux servers, which would allow large scale attacks such as the one on Xbox Live and PSN. Kivimäki disclosed that the operation on Christmas day “was basically done by three people.”
According to him, Lizard Squad has three or four core members, although other individuals outside the group also help.
In an email conversation with Lizard Squad, a member confirmed to us that Kivimäki was indeed part of the group, but they also said that he was protected by international double jeopardy agreements.
Moreover, they added that the reason some Lizard Squad members were okay with showing up on camera was their confidence that they could not be successfully prosecuted for the attacks.
SkyNews also interviewed Vinnie Omari, a security analyst, about the activity of Lizard Squad and their declared enemy, Finest Squad.
Security blogger Brian Krebs made a connection between Omari and the hacker group after he compared the voice from the SkyNews interview with the one of the analyst in a video on his YouTube channel, where he talked about hackerforums[.]net.
Lizard Squad hacker works in the security industry
In another interview, this time with the BBC (check it out below), a Lizard Squad member, whose voice very much resembles that of Vinnie Omari, disclosed that he worked in the security field and that his brother was a Minecraft fan.
The latest videos posted on his YouTube channel are recordings of Minecraft game playing. However, this is just speculation as the footage is more than one year old, but it could be that his passion for the game was passed on to his brother.
Krebs found another connection though: “In a thread on Hackforums that Omari began on Dec. 26 using the Hackforums username “Vinnie” Omari says he’s been given vouchers from MegaUpload, and wonders if the Hackforums rules allow him to sell the vouchers on the forum,” the blogger said.
By the looks of it, it is safe to say that only some members are undoxable at the moment; they may not even know each other beyond an online moniker, which makes unmasking them more difficult.
