DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service, attacks have been all over tech news for the past couple of months. LizardSquad, the group responsible for the Xbox and Playstation outages, are now offering a DDoS on demand service, LizardStresser.
It has now emerged that the Christmas, and prior, DDoS attacks were just a marketing ploy and pre-launch “event” for their DDoS on demand service.If you’re wondering who LizardSquad are then worry not! For I covered their earlier exploits and Christmas capers here and here.
Luckily Mark James was on hand to give us a bit of info about DDoS attacks and his brief prediction for the future of LizardStresser.
“Dark recesses of the web…”
“DDoS attacks have been around for a while: some have been used by disgruntled gaming enthusiast against Server owners or, as we’ve seen recently, used against large corporations to bring their services to a halt thus affecting millions of gamers when they want to use those services the most,” in reference to the Christmas downtime suffered by Xbox Live and PSN.
“These types of attacks are illegal as they violate policies set by nearly all ISP’s not to mention the fact that a lot of countries see DDoS as a direct violation of some internet laws.”
LizardSquad’s own service, LizardStresser, can be used for as little as $6. If you have a bit more cash on hand then you can spend “$130 per month, or $500 worth of bitcoin if you wish to have unlimited attempts,” as explained by Graham Cluley in his article on WeLiveSecurity.com.
Mark explains that “they have made it quite clear it’s for DDoS not for testing networks, as such tools could be used for.
“This is nothing new. These types of tools have been around for a long time: from creating viruses to subscription based malware.
“They often come to light then slip into the dark recesses of the web: attacking companies from the supposed anonymity of the internet is one thing, selling and maintaining a tool is a completely different matter and will be a lot harder to stay anonymous for very long.”
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Were you affected by the Christmas DDoSing? Do you know anyone who was?