Hacking

Update: After our story went live, a Twitter user claiming to be a member of Lizard Squad informed XBLA Fans that the cyber attack on Xbox Live took place between 9:00 and 11:00 pm UTC on Sunday. In a follow-up tweet, he stated that the alleged perpetrators “did manage to fix the lower restrictive server that allowed local play to be revived in a couple of hours.” Our original story is below.

Many gamers, including some XBLA Fans staffers, experienced difficulty playing multiplayer games over Xbox Live last night. If you were one of them, you now know who to blame for your woes.

Lizard Squad, the same collective of nefarious internet users behind attacks that brought Xbox Live to its knees this past holiday, has claimed responsibility for the network problems. In conjunction with the group Like No Other, Lizard Squad apparently hit Xbox Live with another shot from its weapon of choice: a DDoS attack.

Though XBL appears to have since fully recovered from the attack, this may have just been the opening salvo of Lizard Squad’s latest offensive. “More to come, it’s about time to re-ignite lizardsquad,” the group tweeted last night. Gamers may recall that the biggest holiday DDoS attack was preceded by a smaller one.

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Alex Garden, the General Manager of Xbox Live, responded to the bevy of Live account security issues that have arisen these past months largely thanks to an exploit in FIFA 12. “While we here at Xbox have no evidence of a security breach in the Xbox LIVE service,” said Garden, “that is of little comfort to our members whose accounts have been compromised by malicious and illegal attacks.” By directly addressing the problem Garden took a decidedly different approach than Microsoft employed when they silently updated XBL security last month.

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Microsoft, in an attempt to prevent Xbox Live accounts from being compromised, has apparently added more rigorous security standards to Xbox.com, according to a report emanating from Eurogamer. Certain malicious individuals were previously able to gain access to other users’ XBL accounts by using what is known as a “brute-force method.” The site was allowing said parties to infinitely attempt Windows Live ID passwords — a process that was automated by use of a script.

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