Lizard Squad unveils DDoS-as-a-service following PSN and Xbox Live attacks

DDOS
D-Days of another kind

Lizard Squad, the hacker group behind the DDoS (distributed denial of service) that prevented millions of gamers worldwide of playing on Sony's PSN and Microsoft's Xbox Live, have come up with a new tool that could well make the lives of webmasters a little more difficult.

The entity released a new service called LizardStresser, one that allows anyone to launch their own DDoS attacks on any websites for anything between $6 (about £4, AU$7) to $500 (about £330, AU$570) with the latter offering 30,000 seconds of DDoS.

The site is currently offline with a message stating "Switching servers... will be back online soon - All paid accounts will receive one week bonus as compensation". The service can only be paid by Bitcoin for now, with Paypal coming later.

Big targets

"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 website's homepage displayed before being taken down.

A member of the Lizard Squad told the Daily Dot that the Christmas attacks on Sony and Microsoft have proved to be a "huge marketing scheme" for its new DDoS service.

2015 is likely to see a proliferation of such online criminal hacking services as technologies such as Tor and Bitcoin allow for entire ecosystems to develop easily.

Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.