Abr e Karam (Bhopal - A Prayer for Rain) HD.mp4 by mohammadkamranrao
Users are having trouble signing into Xbox Live, and hacker group Lizard Squad is taking credit. While Microsoft's MSFT +1.91% service status page doesn’t report any problems, Xbox owners on Twitter TWTR -6.47% are reporting issues, and I personally have been getting a 8015909 error code whenever I’ve tried to sign in. The group warned that this attack was a preview of a much bigger one on Christmas:
“That’s a small dose of what’s to come on Christmas. #LizardSquad.”
Lizard Squad has made a name for itself taking credit for a number of high-profile Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDOS), which have brought down prominent gaming services from Playstation Network to Battle.net, Grand Theft Auto, League of Legends and more. Originally, the group claimed that it attacked Sony because it had begun charging for multiplayer services on Playstation without putting that money back into its network services, but there doesn’t seem to much logic to the rest of its activity beyond the fact that they’re all in the video game space.
“Some lizards just want to watch the world burn,” reads the description on the Twitter account. Burning might be a little bit of an exaggeration for a few hours of people being unable to watch Netflix NFLX -2.58% and play Call of Duty deathmatches, but, hey. The group also took credit for bomb threats that diverted an American Airlines flight carrying a sony executive.
It’s important to remember that DDOS attacks shouldn’t really be considered “hacks –” it doesn’t mean that any information is stolen, for example. It just means that the whoever is responsible has overwhelmed the given server with so many requests that it shuts down. It usually takes the company in question a second to get things running again, and then everything goes back to normal. Lizard Squad suggested that it might hit Sony next.
For whatever reason, random hacks like this and video game culture seem to go hand in hand. It’s similar to the way that trolls seem to dog the community: chalk it up to a large, tech-savvy population with a tendency to get bored. Maybe we should just chalk it up to a relatively lackluster release season
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