A mysterious collective that calls itself the "Lizard Squad" has been crowing about high-profile hacking exploits through Twitter.
Seemingly seeking attention rather than data, the hackers took down the Sony PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network on Sunday with a distributed denial-of-service attack, Bloomberg Businessweek reported.
While Sony had its sites up again in less than 24 hours and said no account information was compromised, the hackers definitely served their purpose of garnering attention. Under the Twitter handle @LizardSquad, they took credit for the Sony breach and tweeted about a bomb threat to an American Airlines flight. The account has an impressive 51,000 followers.
The plane mentioned in a Lizard Squad tweet was carrying Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley at the time. After an emergency landing in Phoenix, the matter was passed on to the FBI.
"Yes. My plane was diverted. Not going to discuss more than that. Justice will find these guys," Smedley wrote in his own tweet following the incident.
Cole Stryker, author of the book "Hacking the Future: Privacy, Identity, and Anonymity on the Web," compared Lizard Squad to a former group from the early days of hacking culture.
"Very trollish, prankstery," said Stryker, as quoted by ABC News. "I don't believe this person genuinely wants to be involved in geopolitics. I think this person is just having a laugh."
Stryker went on to explain typical DDoS attacks, which are generally accomplished in one of two ways.
"It can be a bunch of people getting on their computers and bombarding a website with dummy traffic in order to overload the servers or it could be a single actor who has access to a botnet, which is a network of compromised computers that have been taken over for the person conducting the attack," Stryker said.
The vocal Lizard Squad has also claimed credit for taking down the Vatican's website, Battle.net and League of Legends.
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