Monthly Archives: December 2014

How Mega founder Kim Dotcom helped Xbox Live, PSN recover from Lizard Squad’s DDoS attack

How Kim Dotcom helped stop holiday Xbox Live and PSN DDoS attacks Over the Christmas holiday, a loosely organized group of hackers known as Lizard Squad took down Microsoft’s online gaming service, Xbox Live (XBL), as well as Sony’s online gaming platform, PlayStation Network (PSN), through coordinated denial-of-service attacks (DDoS). But the legally embattled owner of Mega, Kim Dotcom, may have offered the olive branch that helped both online gaming services slowly come back online. DDoS attacks are implemented by either forcing the targeted network’s service or website to reset, or by consuming its resources at such a high level that it can no longer function. While relatively simple and not considered “hacking” by security experts, large-scale DDoS attacks, like those against Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network, require the use of massive “botnets,” compromised computers all working in unison to overwhelm a service. This meant that for the majority of the holiday, including Christmas Day and Boxing Day, two of the highest traffic online gaming days of the year, most people were unable to access either Xbox Live or PSN. While Lizard Squad’s motivations for the attacks are still unclear, the group claims they want Microsoft and Sony to improve security on their online services. Just like many online attacks of this kind, it’s more likely they were perpetrated simply because they were possible, especially since preventing a DDoS attack is difficult regardless of how secure a network is. The controversy surrounding the attacks also involved a rival hacking group, The Finest Squad, allegedly attempting multiple times to take down Lizard Squad over the course of the holidays through their own DDoS attacks and by “doxing,” releasing the personal information of Lizard Squad members. These efforts ultimately failed and both PSN and XBL remained offline until Dotcom intervened. Lizard Squad and The Finest Squad also frequently traded insults through social media and on popular YouTube hacking-focused talk show, DramaAlert. This is where Kim Dotcom comes in: contacting Lizard Squad directly and promising the group 3,000 $99 Lifetime accounts, worth approximately $300,000 in total, for his encrypted upload service, Mega, if they stopped their DDoS assault on XBL and PSN. Lizard Squad also credited Dotcom with being the main peacemaker in terms of getting the attacks to stop. Despite one faction of Lizard Squad claiming all attacks have ceased, another faction of the group reportedly continued disrupting XBL and PSN, creating free digital game listings for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Destiny. When both services went back online they were also overwhelmed with thousands of users trying to log into their profiles simultaneously, creating additional difficulties for Microsoft and Sony’s online infrastructure. However, As of Dec. 30th, both Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network are running relatively smoothly. Despite playing an important role in getting both gaming services back online, some have criticized Dotcom for setting a dangerous precedent by giving away free Mega accounts to malicious hackers. Other recent high-profile hacking incidents include a group of hackers known as the Guardians of Peace gaining access to Sony’s internal network and leaking a number unreleased films, and also threatening a terrorist attack if the controversial movie The Interview was released. Source: http://business.financialpost.com/2014/12/30/how-mega-founder-kim-dotcom-helped-stop-holiday-xbox-live-and-psn-ddos-attacks-by-appeasing-lizard-squad/?__lsa=7896-d0fe

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How Mega founder Kim Dotcom helped Xbox Live, PSN recover from Lizard Squad’s DDoS attack

Crunchyroll Streaming Service Down Amid DDoS Attack

The Crunchyroll streaming service announced on Tuesday that it is currently down due to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack “of the same magnitude” as those recently targeted towards Sony and Microsoft consoles . Crunchyroll service went down at approximately 4:00 a.m. EST on Tuesday. DDoS attacks against Sony and Microsoft started on Christmas Day and made services on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles unavailable for approximately three days. A hacking group known as Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for the attacks. Crunchyroll has over 400,000 reported paid subscribers. Source: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2014-12-30/crunchyroll-streaming-service-down-amid-ddos-attack/.82769

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Crunchyroll Streaming Service Down Amid DDoS Attack

DDoS attack on Swedish Parliament’s website

The official website of the Swedish Parliament was taken down on Tuesday, in what officials labelled “an outside attack”. The website, riksdagen.se, was taken down at 11am on Tuesday, with visitors met by a blank screen. By 2pm, the website was up and running again, but officials confirmed that the problem had not been caused by any internal IT troubles. “It went down because of an attack from the outside,” Riksdag spokesperson Anna Olderius told the TT news agency. “But we refuse to comment on security issues in any more detail than that.” The cyber attack marks the second against the website in the past two years. In October 2012, the website went down together with that of the country’s central bank other government websites, news networks, and university home pages. Hacktivist network Anonymous claimed responsibility for the October attacks. “You don’t fuck with the internet,” the group wrote online, in what was apparently a response to police raids on the previous hosts to The Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks. The attacks were carried out via a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), where a website is bombarded with communication requests so that the servers become overloaded and the site crashes. As yet, no one has claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s attack. Source: http://www.thelocal.se/20141230/cyber-attack-hits-government-website

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DDoS attack on Swedish Parliament’s website

‘Bitcoin Baron’ claims credit for City of Columbia, KOMU DDoS attacks

He cited a 2010 SWAT raid in Columbia as his motivation behind the DDoS attacks. An individual is taking credit for the distributed denial of service attacks on the websites of the City of Columbia and KOMU-8 on Friday. KOMU posted about the attack on its Facebook page at 3:48 p.m. Friday, about three hours after the station had reported on a similar attack on the City of Columbia’s website earlier Friday. KOMU’s article included a statement from Assistant City Manager Tony St. Romaine indicating the activist group Anonymous was behind the attacks. Shortly after their site was attacked, KOMU received an email from a third party who indicated that he, not Anonymous, was behind both attacks. KOMU General Manager Marty Siddall said the individual referred to himself as “Bitcoin Baron.” Through his Twitter, Bitcoin Baron has connected himself to multiple other DDoS attacks. Bitcoin Baron said in a video that his motivation behind the attacks was a 2010 Columbia SWAT raid on the house of Jonathan Whitworth, who was presumed to be a marijuana dealer. During the raid, one of Whitworth’s dogs was fatally shot in front of his wife and child. “I decided that this should go viral once more to show everyone the true nature of how you and every police department does things,” Bitcoin Baron said in his video. Bitcoin Baron said in a tweet that no data was affected by any of the DDoS attacks. Prasad Calyam, assistant professor of computer science with a technical focus in cyber security, said DDoS attacks occur when a user creates a large amount of fake traffic that accesses a site’s servers all at once to crash the site. “(A DDoS attack) is a sort of brute force attack, where many machines are compromised to act like regular users in order to block real users from reaching the site,” he said. Calyam said DDoS attacks cannot be stopped as they occur, and he advised that locally blocking a website is the best way to deal with an attack. “(That is) because it’s hard for an Internet provider to block people from accessing your site,” he said. “The only way to prevent attacks is through an intrusion detection system, which can be really expensive … There are open source intrusion detection systems available, but they must be maintained and managed by experts.” Siddall said KOMU is working with their third-party Internet provider to prevent future attacks. Source: http://www.themaneater.com/stories/2014/12/29/bitcoin-baron-claims-credit-city-columbia-komu-ddo/

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‘Bitcoin Baron’ claims credit for City of Columbia, KOMU DDoS attacks

Sony FINGERS DDoS attackers for ruining PlayStation’s Xmas

Malefactors turned festivities into a turkey for online gamers Sony has blamed distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attackers for causing PlayStation’s network to go titsup on Christmas Day.…

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Sony FINGERS DDoS attackers for ruining PlayStation’s Xmas

Sony issues formal response to DDoS attacks in PSN update

For the first time in days, Sony has issued a formal response to the ongoing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) affecting various networks in the gaming industry, including PlayStation Network. While the update doesn’t offer much in terms of when PlayStation owners can expect full service to resume, Sony has at least assured us that they are working to restore full network access. Note: An update on Sony’s official support page notes that service is restored on PS3 and Vita; however, PSN is still down on PS4. A special section of the website is dedicated to PSN post-restoration that says if you are continuing to experience problems after PSN services are fully restored to refer to Contact Support. Here’s the full message from Catherine Jensen, VP of SCEA Consumer Experience. The video game industry has been experiencing high levels of traffic designed to disrupt connectivity and online gameplay. Multiple networks, including PSN, have been affected over the last 48 hours. PSN engineers are working hard to restore full network access and online gameplay as quickly as possible. From time to time there may be disruptions in service due to surges in traffic, but our engineers will be working to restore service as quickly as possible. If you received a PlayStation console over the holidays and have been unable to log onto the network, know that this problem is temporary and is not caused by your game console. We’ll continue to keep you posted on Twitter at @AskPlayStation and we’ll update this post once the problems subside. Thanks again for your patience. The DDoS attacks on PSN (and Xbox LIVE) began around Christmas Day. Though neither Sony nor Microsoft admitted to being DDoS’d, the notorious hacker group Lizard Squad was eager to claim credit. For those unfamiliar, this is the same group that launched multiple attacks earlier this year, including bomb threats to SOE president John Smedley. On Friday, one of the numerous Twitter accounts claiming to be Lizard Squad said the DDoS attacks were stopped and that any ongoing disruptions were “just the aftermath” of hours worth of traffic bombardment. However, another account claiming to be one of the prominent members of Lizard Squad, continued to tweet out messages suggesting the DDoS attacks were continuing. Even now, two days after Christmas, PSN is still struggling to return to full service; although, some believe it to be Sony simply restructuring its system architecture. At this point it’s still not 100 percent certain if the outages are ongoing DDoS attacks, but it appears for now at least that Sony has a grasp on the problem and is working to restore service. Hopefully they are addressing the issues and even working to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. Considering this isn’t the first time PSN has been brought down for a lenghty period, I’m hoping Sony will finally take some serious action in preventing this sort of outage again. But, I’m also skeptical; if they haven’t learned by now, when will they? Source: http://www.gamezone.com/news/sony-issues-formal-response-to-ddos-attacks-in-psn-update-9048-jrni

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Sony issues formal response to DDoS attacks in PSN update

Update: Columbia’s website back online after cyber attack; KOMU down from DDoS attack

UPDATE: This story has been updated to include details of another denial of service attack on KOMU and additional comments on FBI involvement in investigating the attack on Columbia’s website. COLUMBIA — The city’s official website is back online after being down since Wednesday night, when a cyber attack flooded the server with information requests. But the hacker responsible might have found a new target in KOMU. The city’s site, gocolumbiamo.com, was back up as of 12:35 p.m. The site provides information and updates to the public about city services and events. Deputy city manager Tony St. Romaine said city officials have been in touch with the FBI about the incident. Joel Sealer, a spokesman for the FBI in Kansas City, said only that city officials had been in contact with the agency, but he would not comment on or confirm the existence of an investigation. St. Romaine said the activist hacker group Anonymous was the source of the attack on the city’s site, but a YouTube video posted by Bitcoin Baron denies that affiliation and claims sole responsibility for the attack. In the video’s introduction, Bitcoin Baron states that the attack is in retaliation for a February 2010 incident where Columbia police killed one dog and wounded another during a drug raid. The YouTube video then shows footage from the raid. The city’s website was hit by a distributed denial of services attack, which sent requests from multiple sources to the site’s server to overload its bandwidth capacity. City staff became aware of the problem at around 11 p.m. Wednesday and shut down access to the site to sort out the problem. KOMU.com’s outage began around 3 p.m. Friday, and KOMU posted on its Facebook page at 4 p.m. Saturday to address the distributed denial of service attack. In the post, KOMU calls the attack a “direct result” of its reporting on the city’s website being taken down. Its story noted that city officials believed Anonymous was responsible, but a third party contacted the news station to claim responsibility and threaten to take down KOMU.com as well. Attacks of this nature generally don’t result in the theft of information or other security loss, St. Romaine said. “Your system is not getting hacked into, and data is not getting compromised,” he said. Source: http://www.columbiamissourian.com/a/183192/update-columbias-website-back-online-after-cyber-attack-komu-down/

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Update: Columbia’s website back online after cyber attack; KOMU down from DDoS attack

PlayStation clambers back online 48 hours after DDoS attack CRIPPLED network

Titsup gaming service struggling to return to life Sony’s PlayStation network is slowly returning to normal service roughly 48 hours after it was hit by another major denial-of-service attack on Christmas Day.…

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PlayStation clambers back online 48 hours after DDoS attack CRIPPLED network

PlayStation clambers back online 48 hours after DDoS attack PARALYSED network

Titsup gaming service struggling to return to life Sony’s PlayStation network is slowly returning to normal service roughly 48 hours after it was hit by another major distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Christmas Day.…

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PlayStation clambers back online 48 hours after DDoS attack PARALYSED network

PlayStation clambers back online days after DDoS attack PARALYSED network

Gaming service STILL struggling to return to life Updated Sony’s PlayStation network is slowly returning to normal service roughly 48 hours after it was hit by another major distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Christmas Day.…

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PlayStation clambers back online days after DDoS attack PARALYSED network