10 years ago
Lizard Squad claims responsbility for yesterday’s Xbox Live attack *updated*
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.
Lizard Squad members apprehended by authorities
Like millions of other Xbox gamers, you may have had trouble logging onto Xbox Live during Christmas. That’s because both Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network were victimized by DDoS attacks that took them offline, but authorities may be closing in on the parties responsible.
YLE reported last week that a supposed member of Lizard Squad, the group claiming responsibility for the attacks, had been apprehended by Finnish authorities. A 17-year old identified only as “Ryan” was brought in for questioning, but Chief Inspector Tero Muurman of Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation has since stated that Ryan was not detained, only questioned about his possible involvement.
During his questioning, Ryan denied direct involvement in the attack, claiming to only be a spokesperson for Lizard Squad. He played the part during an interview with Sky News in which he said the actual team of attackers consisted of only one or two individuals.
Although Ryan said the group may contain members younger than the age of 20, one of them may be 22-year old Vinnie Omari, who The Daily Dot reports was arrested by UK authorities on December 29 in connection to the DDoS attacks. Omari was later released on bail, with no formal charges having yet been filed. Omari told the Dot that a forensics team was pouring over his “Xbox one, phones, laptops, computer USBs, etc.”
10 years ago
Xbox Live on Xbox 360 down again, second time this week
On Monday, December 1, 2014, services on Xbox Live for the Xbox 360 were temporarily unavailable for several hours as users were unable to connect online. Xbox One users were unaffected by the disruption of the service. The hacker group Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack and had this to say:
Xbox.com’s Support page did not issue any service alerts on the first outage.
On December 5, 2014, services on Xbox Live were once again halted for the Xbox 360 as users were unable to connect online. This time around users have been sporadically able to connect but have not been able to keep up a connection for a significant time. Lizard Squad has once again taken credit for causing problems to the Xbox Live services, saying this recent attack came at the behest of a follower.