Lizard Squad

October 6, 2016

Feds Charge Two In Lizard Squad Investigation

This post was originally published on this siteThe U.S. Justice Department has charged two 19-year-old men alleged to be core members of the hacking groups Lizard Squad and PoodleCorp. The pair are charged with credit card theft and operating so-called “booter”or “stresser” services that allowed paying customers to launch powerful attacks designed to knock Web sites offline. The PoodleCorp/PoodleStresser attack-for-hire service. Image: USDOJ. Federal investigators charged Zachary Buchta of Fallston, Md., and Bradley Jan Willem Van Rooy of Leiden, the Netherlands with conspiring to cause damage to protected computers. According to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, Buchta, […]
October 27, 2016

Are the Days of “Booter” Services Numbered?

This post was originally published on this siteIt may soon become easier for Internet service providers to anticipate and block certain types of online assaults launched by Web-based attack-for-hire services known as “booter” or “stresser” services, new research released today suggests. The findings come from researchers in Germany who’ve been studying patterns that emerge when miscreants attempt to mass-scan the entire Internet looking for systems useful for launching these digital sieges — known as “distributed denial-of-service” or DDoS attacks. To understand the significance of their research, it may help to briefly examine how DDoS attacks have evolved. Not long ago, if one […]
November 4, 2016

Ne’er-Do-Well News and Cyber Justice

This post was originally published on this siteWay back in the last millennium when I was a lowly copy aide at The Washington Post, I pitched the Metro Section editor on an idea for new column: “And the Good News Is…” The editor laughed me out of her office. But I still think it’s a decent idea — particularly in the context of cybersecurity — to periodically highlight the good news when people allegedly responsible for spewing so much badness online are made to face justice. NCA officials lead away a suspect arrested in this week’s raids. Image: NCA. In the United Kingdom this week, […]
April 25, 2017

UK Man Gets Two Years in Jail for Running ‘Titanium Stresser’ Attack-for-Hire Service

This post was originally published on this siteA 20-year-old man from the United Kingdom was sentenced to two years in prison today after admitting to operating and selling access to “Titanium Stresser,” a simple-to-use service that let paying customers launch crippling online attacks against Web sites and individual Internet users. Adam Mudd of Herfordshire, U.K. admitted to three counts of computer misuse connected with his creating and operating the attack service, also known as a “stresser” or “booter” tool. Services like Titanium Stresser coordinate so-called “distributed denial-of-service” or DDoS attacks that hurl huge barrages of junk data at a site in […]