Attackers Behind PS4's Christmas Outage Hit by Heavy Hack

Behave badly and your actions will catch up with you eventually, as some members of the so-called Lizard Squad may be realising right now. After attaining plenty of mainstream media coverage following the PlayStation Network outage which it apparently initiated over Christmas, the group launched a DDoS service, enabling paying customers to use its software to take down other sites and networks. However, in a twist of irony, that platform has now been hacked, with the details of the 14,241 accounts that signed up to use it out in the public domain.

According to a blog post by investigative journalist Brian Krebs, the site was poorly protected, with sensitive details such as usernames and passwords stored without any encryption at all. Of course, this is more than an egg in the face of the cyber attackers, as the leak contains information that may be of interest to the appropriate authorities. "If you look at the site, it's clearly run by someone who doesn't have much formal experience in software engineering," one computer science student told the BBC. "Most of what they're doing is not really impressive."

There's some speculation that hacking Lizard Squad has been the priority of several security professionals, who are frustrated by the group's rise to prominence through such malicious activities. "There seems to be a general sense in the security research community that these guys are in way over their heads, and that if we can't bring to justice a bunch of teenagers in Western nations who are rubbing it in everyone's faces, then that's a sad state of affairs," Krebs concluded. Personally, we're hoping that this convinces the group's members to re-evaluate their life priorities.