The hacker group that calls itself the Lizard Squad took down PSN and Xbox Live last week with a massive DDoS attack. Now, it looks like they're selling the attack as a service to anyone who can pay.
The attacks last week screwed things up for gamers who wanted to play their newly unwrapped toys. It turns out the Lizard Squad may not have just been messing around. They may have been using the attacks as marketing for a theoretically legitimate stress testing (read: DDoS) service they just started selling.
The newly launched "Lizard Stresser," as its name implies, is a stress tester, one you might point at your own network to see how it might handle a DDOS. For a fee, the Lizard Squad will unleash their attack on the server or servers of your choice and you can check if your defenses are up to snuff.
The flipside, of course, is that this basically a DDoS for sale. Don't like somebody? Pay a few bucks and take their business down. Lizard Squad goes to great lengths to try to cover their asses present this service as a tool that's not to be used maliciously. The terms of service stipulate:
Permission is granted to stress test dedicated servers and networks owned by you. This is the oppurtunity [sic] to make your firewalls better, not to misuse against the law. This is a license given to you and anything you do while on http://lizardstresser.su/ is your own responsibility as we are not liable.
As an additional safeguard against misuse, Lizard Squad apparently prevents users from proceeding while using a virtual private network to conceal where they are.
This service could be hijacked for malicious use. At the moment, it can only be paid for with Bitcoin, which is virtually untraceable. It's not hard to imagine how somebody who wanted to do some damage might circumvent safeguards. Not to mention that despite all the legal posturing, the Lizard Squad dudes don't seem particularly upstanding; they did attack PSN and Xbox Live on Christmas, after all. Also TOR.
Does it work? We haven't tried it for obvious reasons. But the Lizard Squad account is legit, and it seems pretty clear that they're the hackers behind last week's attacks. They probably have the capacity to launch this service. Whether you should trust them to give you what you pay for is another issue.
Finally, it's not clear that this was the original intent of the Lizard Squad's actions. Did they start out as trolls and then realize they could make some money? Or did they intend to launch these attacks all along? Whatever the case, you can be pretty sure this service will made another headline or two. [Lizard Stresser via Daily Dot]