Busted for Lizard Squad Attacks

Did you know you could pay for a service to have a website taken down for several hours?  It does carry some risk though, as six young men found out recently in the UK.

You may recall when the Xbox and PlayStation online services went down a while back.  The group behind that attack called themselves the Lizard Squad.  They sued a stresser tool to take down the popular gaming platforms.  A stresser uses bandwidth from hacked routers (usually ones with factory default security settings) to overload a system, rendering it offline for up to eight hours.

Six young men, all below the age of 20, were arrested in the UK after allegedly purchasing the Lizard Stresser Tool with Bitcoins and targeting gaming companies, a national newspaper, online retailers and a school.  

A Lizard Stresser website allows people to purchase packages of attacks, which has over 175 paying customers.  These customers have launched over 15,000 attacks on almost 4000 targets in the two months that the service was in operation.  The UK's National Crime Agency is looking into 50 addresses of people who are registered on the website, but have yet to launch any attacks.