Tag Archives: lizard-squad

Teen UK hacker pleads guilty after earning $385k from DDoS tool

Cops say net crims launched 1.7 million attacks from 15 year-old’s creation. A 19 year-old Hertfordshire man has pled guilty to running the Titanium Stresser booter service that offered distributed denial of service (DDoS)-as-a-service.…

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Teen UK hacker pleads guilty after earning $385k from DDoS tool

Justice Charges Hackers From Lizard Squad, PoodleCorp

Two teenagers face charges from the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly being members of well-known hacking groups Lizard Squad and PoodleCorp. On Thursday (Oct. 6), Krebs on Security reported that the pair have been charged with credit card theft and operating services that enabled paying customers to launch cyberattacks with the intention of knocking websites offline. The two 19-year-olds, Zachary Buchta and Bradley Jan Willem van Rooy, are believed to have conspired to cause damage to protected computers. “The charges are the result of an international investigation into the computer hacking groups ‘Lizard Squad’ and ‘PoodleCorp,’ according to a criminal complaint and affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago,” a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois said. “Buchta and van Rooy allegedly conspired with others to launch destructive cyberattacks around the world and trafficked payment accounts that had been stolen from unsuspecting victims in Illinois and elsewhere,” it continued. Last year, the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) arrested six teenagers for allegedly attempting to access a tool used by the Lizard Squad hacker group. Just days after those arrests were made, the NCA itself was taken down by a targeted cyberattack. The NCA’s website was down for more than an hour and was the target of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. In DDoS attacks, hackers bombard a targeted website with an overflow of data, eventually causing the entire network to crash. Lizard Squad took to Twitter shortly after the attack to take credit for the site shutdown. The group also gained press last year for supposedly launching a new business venture that allows anyone to join its security-breaching ways for a low cost of $6 a month. The subscription service known as LizardStresser allows subscribers to obtain a distributed denial-of-service attack tool. “This booter is famous for taking down some of the world’s largest gaming networks, such as Xbox Live, Playstation Network, Jagex, BattleNet, League of Legends and many more!” the LizardStresser homepage boasted at the time. “With this stresser, you wield the power to launch some of the world’s largest denial-of-service attacks.” Source: http://www.pymnts.com/news/security-and-risk/2016/hackers-from-lizard-squad-poodlecorp-arrested/

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Justice Charges Hackers From Lizard Squad, PoodleCorp

Overwatch,’ ‘Warcraft’ Servers Sidelined By DDoS Attack From Hacking Group PoodleCorp

Blizzard was hit with a DDoS attack that made its servers inaccessible, disrupting gameplay for Battle.net users on Aug. 2. Someone from Blizzard’s customer support team posted on the Battle.net forums to acknowledge the attack, saying network engineers are on the case, working to address the issue. The problem has since been resolved, but according to a tweet from Blizzard’s North American customer support team, reports of World Server Down in  World of Warcraft  are being investigated. In a tweet, hacker group PoodleCorp claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack. It’s not clear who is PoodleCorp exactly, but some Battle.net users have surmised that some of the hacking group’s members could be players who were recently banned from  Overwatch , and thus now out for revenge. Whoever they are, PoodleCorp appears to be a busy group. A day before the DDoS attack on Blizzard, the hackers apparently took on  Pokémon GO , marking their second takedown of the mobile game after first attacking it on July 16. Pokémon GO  servers were also down for several hours on July 17, but OurMine, another hacking group, took the credit for that attack. In an interview via Twitter DM, PoodleCorp’s leader, @xotehpoodle, told Mic that they targeted  Pokémon GO  because it’s popular right now. Also, they’re doing what they’re doing because nobody can stop them. “We do it because we can, nobody can stop us and we just like to cause chaos,” said the hacking group’s head, who added that their botnet is worth more than Niantic. Over the summer, PoodleCorp also claimed responsibility for hacking  League of Legends  and popular YouTubers. Earlier in June, Blizzard also experienced a major outage as another DDoS attack took out its servers. Twitter user AppleJ4ck, said to be tied to hacking group Lizard Squad, claimed responsibility for the attack and mocked Blizzard, saying the attack was part of some “preparations.” As PoodleCorp has claimed responsibility for the most recent outage, does that mean that there’s more to come given what AppleJ4ck’s been preparing for has not come to fruition? In the past, Lizard Squad had been connected to disruptions on Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Sony’s PlayStation Network. When angry gamers swarmed the hackers’ Twitter accounts, PoodleCorp and AppleJ4ck replied with similar messages, saying anyone who gets upset over a game should get a life and that they’re doing everyone a favor by knocking them offline. Source: http://www.techtimes.com/articles/172361/20160803/overwatch-warcraft-servers-sidelined-by-ddos-attack-from-hacking-group-poodlecorp.htm

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Overwatch,’ ‘Warcraft’ Servers Sidelined By DDoS Attack From Hacking Group PoodleCorp

There Are over 100 DDoS Botnets Based on Lizard Squad’s LizardStresser

While most of Lizard Squad’s first members are in jail or hiding and hoping that law enforcement won’t come knocking on their door, the group continues to live on through new members, new attacks, but also through the LizardStresser toolkit, which they leaked online at the start of 2015. The toolkit was heavily forked and adapted, as many other hacking groups sought to use it to create their own botnets to use for DDoS attacks, either just to annoy people, extort companies or hacktivism activities. LizardStresser is geared towards infecting IoT devices Arbor Networks says that LizardStresser is not extremely complicated, and is nothing more than a DDoS attack toolkit that uses the ancient IRC protocol to communicate between the C&C server and the client-side component. Because LizardStresser is coded in C and designed to run on Linux architectures, Arbor Networks says that a lot of groups that are deploying new LizardStresser instances are taking advantage of unsecured IoT devices running on platforms such as x86, ARM, and MIPS, where a stripped-down Linux version is the preferred OS. We touched on this topic last year when Lizard Squad’s new members were having trouble with their own botnet after unknown security researchers were trying to hijack some of these infected IoT systems. Webcams make the bulk of the LizardStresser-based botnets According to Arbor Networks, most of these infected IoT devices are Internet-connected webcams, accessible through a page broadcasting the “NETSurveillance WEB” title, and using their default access passwords. In a DDoS attack of over 400 Gbps aimed at a gaming site, Arbor says that 90% of the bots that participated in the attack were these type of webcams. The DDoS attacks are extremely simple and don’t even use traffic amplification/reflection techniques. LizardStresser was created to launch direct DDoS attacks, meaning the bots send UDP or TCP floods directly to the target. LizardStresser launches direct DDoS attacks, no protocol amplification Because of the massive amount of unsecured IoT devices, groups that use LizardStresser can launch massive DDoS attacks, previously thought to be unachievable without UDP-based amplification protocols such as NTP or SNMP. Furthermore, LizardStresser also includes a telnet brute-forcing feature that’s used to test new devices for default passwords and inform the C&C server about possible new victims. All of these make features make LizardStresser a popular choice when hacking outfits and hacktivism groups are looking for tools to build or broaden their DDoS capabilities. Overall, there’s a growing trend in terms of hacking groups adopting LizardStresser. “LizardStresser is becoming the botnet-du-jour for IOT devices given how easy it is for threat actors to make minor tweaks to telnet scanning,” says Matthew Bing of Arbor Networks. “With minimal reseach [sic] into IOT device default passwords, they are able to enlist an exclusive group of victims into their botnets.” Number of C&C servers using LizardStresser in 2016 Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/there-are-over-100-ddos-botnets-based-on-lizard-squad-s-lizardstresser-505816.shtml#ixzz4D0b6wPkw

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There Are over 100 DDoS Botnets Based on Lizard Squad’s LizardStresser