On Tuesday (27/01) morning Facebook, Instagram and a few other websites requiring Facebook logins went down. Facebook blame a technical fault although Lizard Squad quickly implied they were responsible, experts remain sceptical.
Facebook, Instagram, Tinder and other services which require Facebook authentication were found to be offline by millions of users worldwide for 40 minutes on Tuesday (27/01) morning.
Lizard Squadimplied that they were somehow involved, tweeting “Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad”.
Facebook on the other hand blamed a technical fault possibly caused by their tech team performing maintenance.
We covered Lizard Squad’s past antics here, here, here and here: they have certainly been busy.
“Calling Cards”
Every news outlet out there is reporting that Lizard Squad claimed responsibility, it seems more like inference to me, but if what Facebook says is true then why pretend?
“To be top of your game people need to be aware of you, attacking large companies and not leaving any calling cards won’t make them famous,” Mark James, ESET security specialist explains.
“On the same note being associated with a high profile hack will achieve the same goal but without the actual effort or dangers of doing it.
“If Lizard Squad are being blamed for any and all hacks going around then their fame is only going to spread.”
Mark also said that “fame is often folly and short lived, we talk about Lizard Squad now… just like we talked about Anonymous and Lulzsec last year and the year before.”
What happened to Facebook?
“As with any company the backbone is very often it’s IT infrastructure and that couldn’t be truer than with Facebook. Their very existence is driven by complex computer systems moving huge amounts of data from one place to another.
“This routing is a very important factor and if any problems arise in its transit then the whole flow could be stopped or delayed: simple network configuration or changes could cause chaos.
“This would seem to be the case in this instance, a small change caused the system to go down for 40mins and once found and reverted all was back to normal.”
DDoS a Giant
There has been some speculation whether taking Facebook down to this extent would even be possible. I posed this question to Mark.
“It’s extremely unlikely that a company that relies on massive amounts of web traffic could be hit by a DDOS attack.
“Their business model is built to deal with massive amounts of data being sent to them every second of every minute.
“If they were to go down it is almost certainly going to be an attack from inside their network either targeted from the outside or introduced by an inside means.”
Stay up to date with our blog by joining our LinkedIn Group.
What do you think of Lizard Squads shenanigans?