The Lizard Squad (Article Sample)

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Lizard Squad
The lizard squad is a well-known international group with unique features of the black hat with an objective of hacking social networking software like the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft X-Box. The group gained fame over the few past years by being responsible for various DDoS threats. The most recent victims of this attacks are the PlayStation and the X-Box live networks. The group’s attacks mostly target the internet games and other online social services such as movie streaming, television programs, and music streaming. Furthermore, the group was reported to be responsible for the attacks on the airline companies of Malaysia and North Korea. This well elaborated by Cluley and Graham in “Xbox and Psn Attacks Were “marketing Scheme” for Lizard Squad’s DDoS Service” article.
DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacking is the situation of flooding firewalls and severs on a request with an aim of sabotaging normal functioning of devices in serving significant requests of users. The Conn and the SYN floods are the most common simple attacks experienced. Different attacks produce same result, for instance, whether the server attacked fails or firewall being used by customers fails, the whole network system will be unable to provide services the customers. According to Gao and Zhiqiang “On Mitigating Distributed Denial of Service Attacks” article, HTTP floods dominates 80% of recent DDoS attacks. The request of the hacker for the HTTP floods looks like genuine legalized HTTP request and therefore it is passed to a targeted server through the system’s router. Due to a large number of customer’s requests, in millions, sabotages the ability of the server to identify the real and the attacking requests. Through the use of botnets, hackers have the ability to create such huge numbers to cripple the servers.
In addition, when the personal computer of the user is infected by distributed malware which allows hackers to have access and control on the user’s gadget, then the botnets are developed. Once the gadget is in the access and control of the hacker, it is said to be the “zombie” and then the device is added to the hacker’s botnets. The hackers have now the ability to command his created zombies to attack different targeted destinations he intends to. Home routers are vulnerable targets as revealed in lizard squad’s case on PlayStation and X-Box live networks. In 2011, botnet size reported was approximately 20000 gadgets per network.
During December holidays in 2014, a large number of Microsoft X-Box and Sony PlayStation subscribed users, were subjected to cyber-attack. This attack occurred as a result of playing video games and watching movies on their favorite Sony PlayStation and Microsoft X-Box websites that totally crippled their other online services. For the Microsoft’s case, the problem took two days on recovering, but for the Sony services, was unavai