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Looks like they are both down due to Hacktivist group. 
UK site but it seems legit.
UK site but it seems legit.
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Originally posted by Taya Kyle, American Gun -
I got a PS4 yesterday with Destiny, haven't been able to play anything yet. DL'd a free game from the Plus Membership can't play it either. Been trying since last night with no luck. Won't even let me watch Netflix on it. LoL, having some -
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Without my gun hobby. I would cut off my own dick and let the rats eat it...
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Yeah I haven't been able to get on xbl at all today.Comment
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So @finestsec outted the @lizardsquad people responsible for the ddos on Xbox and psn. All their info is posted on lizardsquad.infoComment
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I guess Kim Dotcom finally stepped in and gave the 3,000 Lizard Squad members lifetime accounts on his upload site. I stopped trying to log in to Live and PSN around 2300 last night.Originally posted by lowthreeohz View Post
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertco...-lizard-squad/
A week ago, I read an article that claimed the infamous Lizard Squad had been dismantled for good, taken down not by the FBI, but by a rival group of “whitehat” hackers, Finest Squad. It’s a rather good piece, chronicling how the new group essentially beat the digital vandals at their own game, and outed them to authorities.
Unfortunately, it appears not to have worked. I’m not sure if a hydra is technically a lizard, but it seems if you cut off a few heads, more spring up in their place when it comes to the Lizard Squad. Though the original piece claimed Finest Squad was “saving Christmas” from Lizard Squad who vowed to bring down Sony's PSN and Microsoft's MSFT -0.35% Xbox Live over the holiday, that’s exactly what happened Christmas Day.
Lizard Squad still exists as an organization, refashioned under a new Twitter TWTR +0.61% account, different than the one I used to follow back in their “American Airlines bomb scare to ground Sony executive” days. They took to Twitter to announce they were indeed laying siege to PSN and Xbox Live, and the services experienced some pretty massive outages throughout the day as a result.
kim dotcom
One such afflicted user was Kim Dotcom, founder of MegaUpload and not an uncontroversial figure himself. And here’s where the story takes a strange turn.
Dotcom reached out to Lizard Squad directly, promising them 3,000 Lifetime accounts on his encrypted upload service, Mega. Lizard Squad bit, as the DM string below indicates:
dm
After the fact, Lizard Squad directly credited Dotcom with being the peacemaker who made them cease the attacks, and service has largely been restored. Whether that’s coincidence or literally Lizard Squad pressing the “off” button, we can’t be sure.
Still, it’s the latest case of hackers holding things hostage and actually getting what they wanted, the most high profile being the Sony hack/threat which got The Interview pulled from theaters. This PSN/Xbox Live/Dotcom/Lizard situation is a more lighthearted example, but a similar structure.
Dotcom is being heralded as a hero by many who just wanted to play video games on Christmas with their new consoles, and I do like his contingency plan of killing the vouchers if Lizard Squad keeps up their attacks, so it wasn’t just a blank check. I have my doubts that will keep them at bay, but I’m not really sure what will at this point.
I’m very curious to find out more about what happened with the Finest Squad saga, as that was pitched as a very definitive end to the hacker group. That clearly wasn’t the case, and a significant enough cluster of them survived to continue to carry out these kinds of attacks. Since they and others like them aren’t going away, a better question might be what Sony, Microsoft and others are doing to prevent themselves from being completely and utterly crippled by something as relatively simple as constant DDoS attacks.
I don’t know whether Dotcom is a hero or setting a bad precedent, but it’s a rather hilarious story, and hey, at least this time it didn’t involve a bomb threat. Unfortunately, I doubt we’ve seen the last of the Lizard Squad, and gaming companies need to be doing everything in their power to shore up their security so this kind of thing doesn’t keep happening.
Update: While Xbox Live is back up, it seems PSN is down again for most players. Lizard Squad claims there’s no active attack and whatever is happening is just the remnants of what they did earlier. An alternate theory is that Sony is simply struggling under the burden of heavy holiday traffic, which may be compounding things, whether the service is under attack or not. Hopefully they’ll get a handle on it soon. Not a great month for Sony.
Update 2: I’ve come to find that there’s a second Lizard Squad Twitter account, one different than the one I’ve linked above, and the old one I used to follow. This account is not the one that interacted with Kim Dotcom yesterday, and is claiming responsibility for taking PSN down as we speak, demanding the usual retweets and nude pictures to get it back online. It’s hard to know what exactly is happening here with splinter groups and possibly fake accounts springing up left and right. Kim Dotcom could have been played by a faux account and the restoration of Xbox Live (and briefly PSN) was just a coincidence, or these could be warring factions (both have tens of thousands of followers, but it’s not as if hacker accounts get verified badges). Or as a believable option, Sony could be melting down all on their own during what’s obviously a peak traffic time of the year, with these accounts just taking credit. More to come.Comment
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Interesting. Ballsy, for Forbes to post such a thing. Makes them a bit of a target too, doesn't it?Originally posted by Taya Kyle, American GunComment
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