The Lizard Squad hacking mayhem seems to be over, at least for now, and investigators are currently digging deeper as to how the notorious group managed to infiltrate servers of gaming giants Sony and Microsoft that sent them out the Web for more than 24 hours. Newest reports by KrebsOnSecurity.com revealed that the troop knocked the gaming channels offline with the use of thousands of Internet home routers.
Two youngsters claiming to be part of the organization were arrested subsequent to the attack. It was then revealed that the entire scheme was part of a mere commercial for their "stresser" site, a service that they offer to customers who want to prevent someone or a website from connecting to the Internet for hours and even days. The group reportedly does this by hacking unprotected Internet home routers across the world and sending out denial-of-service attacks, which flood the target site with false traffic.
Lizard Squad exploits routers with factory-default usernames and passwords by sending out malicious codes to control the network of bots remotely. These bots, as QZ explained, are "both good and evil," as they take up half the space of the web traffic. Content delivery platform Incapsula stated that the impersonator bots, likely the ones Lizard Squad deploys, bring along denial-of-service attacks, which manage to occupy a quarter of the bot traffic.
This elaborate-sounding service only requires customers to cash out $3 a month. In KrebsOnSecurity.com's investigation, the service was traced to an Internet provider in Bosnia.
On Christmas Day, the hacking crew disrupted online gaming for many, which led Kim Dotcom to give away 3,000 500 GB storage in MegaUpload to the gang to stop the shenanigans. Apart from the gaming networks, the hacker group interrupted the servers of both KrebsOnSecurity.com and 8chan as well. It was also reported that Lizard Squad also muddled up with the Tor network.
KrebsOnSecurity.com has published "Router Security 101" to educate people on how to protect their routers from being exploited for hacking purposes. QZ also implored that changing default passwords on Internet home routers would help as well.
