
Lizard Squad attacks Brian Krebs - MarcScott
http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/02/technology/security/krebs-lizard-squad/
======
mike_hearn
Big mistake. People who mess with Brian Krebs tend to end up fully doxed and
arrested shortly afterwards. You'd think the blackhat world would understand
this by now. Krebs is _not_ a guy want to be investigated by.

~~~
jonursenbach
You really think people like Lizard Squad, who called their DDOS attack on
Sony and Microsoft "security work", understand how the world works?

~~~
joshmn
I don't think they take themselves too seriously. Nor should we.

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Buge
In the past he's also been swatted and had drugs mailed to him, and a flower
cross saying RIP Brian Krebs.

~~~
icanhasfay
My favorite might have to be the time when someone cut down a tree in his
front yard.
[https://twitter.com/briankrebs/status/334422653475627008](https://twitter.com/briankrebs/status/334422653475627008)

~~~
13
I'm at a complete loss as to what cutting down a tree is supposed to achieve.

~~~
ceejayoz
"I know where you live and am prepared to commit crimes" sends a bit of a
message, don't you think?

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Cub3
His latest tweet

    
    
      Looks like the Finnish kid Julius aka Ryan/zee was arrested in Lizard Squad roundup http://ow.ly/GFeeM

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freshyill
The article says they knocked him offline only briefly, but I'm actually
having trouble loading krebsonsecurity.com right now.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Its up now. Tops story is about the lizard squad. This is an interesting
tidbit:

>These two services, like most booters, are hidden behind CloudFlare

Wow, is cloudflare so poorly run they have no idea they're
hosting/caching/accelerating Lizard Squad tools? CF plays up itself as this
strong security minded service, but it looks like they're in bed with the
blackhats.

I was on the fence with them, but now I think I'm just going to roll my own
mod_security/mod_evasive proxy and call it a day. If they dont care about or
can't detect these types of clients, then I don't want to do business with
them.

~~~
MichaelGG
Cloudflare takes the right approach of being content neutral.

~~~
ForHackernews
Also, if you're selling a DDoS-protection service, it's good business to not
work too hard shutting down DDoSers.

~~~
pktgen
AKA racketeering.

~~~
ForHackernews
Really nice website you got here...be a shame if anything happened to it...

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codyb
I wonder how he tracks them down? And if he can find two so easily (on his
own?) how had they not be outed already?

~~~
hysterix
Well quite frankly if you've been in the scene for a while, you'd be able to
tell using other clues, speech patterns, and reused nicks.

Julius Kivimäki aka zee, aka Zeekill
([https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Zeekill](https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Zeekill))
has an extensive history, he actually has been dox'd and outed numerous times
prior to this.

I knew lizard squad was zee by zee's idiotic behaviour. He constantly used the
moniker "Ryan" or "Ryan Clearly" the name of another unrelated hacker. Well
sure enough he gave an interview to someone using that moniker. Having even
the tiniest bit of inside knowledge it was easy to piece together 1 + 1 = 2
and lizard squad is zee, aka julius.

There are other clues too, believe it or not, not too many entities are
capable of massing as large a ddos as they were. Those that have the technical
capability, normally don't advertise as such.

Zee was a "special" case, in that he had the capability, and advertised it as
such, I was astounded the boy hadn't been jailed years prior. As I mentioned
earlier he has an extensive history, and was involved in many of the large
site take downs and ddos's that have made public news.

~~~
rudolf0
Zee/"ryanc" has indeed been involved in things like these for many years. HTP
(Linode + much more) is just a small part of it.

I'm also very surprised it's taken this long for him to be arrested. He's
completely brazen and has committed countless crimes despite knowing full well
the general public and law enforcement know exactly who he is.

And if he truly was/is involved in carding, he probably won't get out for a
while. I can hold some respect for blackhat groups, and hell, even a tiny,
miniscule bit of respect for script kiddies like Lizard Squad, but once they
get into financial fraud and theft my sympathy is gone.

~~~
ryanlol
Just because someone knows who I am does not mean that'll matter when it comes
to proving things in court, which in real life isn't as easy as one might
imagine.

>he probably won't get out for a while

If only I'd get sentenced in the first place.

~~~
meowface
If you get extradited, you're not going to have a fun time...

~~~
ryanlol
Well, I live in a country that will not extradite it's own citizens. And even
if I somehow did manage to get extradited the US has a legal system where
you'd actually have to prove a persons guilt, not just speculate it based on
some IRC log of dubious origin.

~~~
Maarten88
Wow. You have not been following the news lately, and don't understand much
about the us legal system.

~~~
ryanlol
That's a popular view, but I don't think that in real life it's an entirely
correct one. At the very least those with money tend to be able to have a fair
trial in the US.

~~~
Maarten88
I think you'd be facing the choice between a trial with a 500 year prison
charge plus millions in damages and lawyer costs or accepting 10 to 15 years
in prison avoiding the trial.

I hope you have lots of money to guarantee a fair trial, but anyway, I'd
strongly suggest you to never ever travel anywhere near the US for the rest of
your life.

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BillFranklin
Attacks consisted of a briefly successful DDoS and this:

> the group jokes incessantly about Krebs' hairline and proudly proclaims,
> "You can't arrest a lizard."

~~~
sporkenfang
Because clearly his hairline is the deciding factor in whether he can punt
their stupidity back where it belongs.

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krschultz
What is the actual law that someone that engages in DDOS'ing violates? I feel
like we might need one specifically for the activity. It's effectively the
internet version of criminal mischief. It's not hacking and all of that, but
it's also not something that we should just let go all the time. I'm getting
sick of hearing about script kiddies DDOSing random websites, I'd be happy to
see some fines.

~~~
greenyoda
DDOS attacks are generally launched from botnets consisting of computers that
are illegally accessed without their owners' permission. While the DDOS itself
may not violate any laws, executing it via hijacked computers certainly does.

~~~
PostOnce
Exactly. Fining them isn't the hard part, finding them is.

Spend $200K on an investigation to find a kid to fine him $10K? Maybe not
worth the time and money unless it provably worked as a deterrent.

~~~
jokoon
how can you sped $200k to find a kid ?

~~~
omegaham
If you employ a certain number of people, it's assumed that they're doing
other things. When you have to devote them to a different project, you're
doing a few things:

1\. Making your staff work overtime.

2\. Leaving other work undone.

3\. Hiring new staff to make up for this.

4\. Keeping redundant personnel on board in case something like this happens
again.

5\. Hiring temporary contractors and services to help you with this specific
task.

All of these cost money.

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normloman
Does anyone know lizard squad's motivation? Are they just out to get
attention, or do they have some grudge against gaming companies? Regardless,
their criminal behavior doesn't impress me or strike me as making a lasting
impact.

~~~
landr0id
It looks like their motivation behind the holiday attacks on Xbox LIVE and PSN
was to get following on their Twitter account to advertise their DDoS-as-a-
service platform.

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UhUhUhUh
Those attacks have the elegance of a sledgehammer and the content of a plastic
bottle washed off on a beach. I am utterly uninterested.

------
ExpiredLink
> _Lizard Squad ruined Christmas for people around the world_

Come on!

~~~
Andrenid
My 13yr old brother spent all year saving his pocket money on a deal with dad
where dad would put in the rest for him to get his first ever gaming console,
an Xbox One. On Christmas he got it, and for 3 days straight he couldn't get
it working AT ALL since the Xbone needs XBL to be online to activate, download
games (they're all download tokens now), etc.

Christmas was well and truly ruined for him. It was heartbreaking to see that
happen to him after all year of working his butt off and looking forward to
it.

~~~
zachlatta
It's saddening to hear that your little brother's Christmas was ruined, but
I'd argue that it's more of the fault of Microsoft designing a closed and
centralized system with extensive DRM than the Lizard Squad's fault for taking
down Xbox Live.

~~~
rando3826
This. Seriously: a company makes a product which has the ability to be broken
by hackers using a method (ddos), which is widely known and extensively used
for over 20 years. And the product is closed source so no one can fix it.
So... hackers break it on christmas. Oh no, it's not the companies fault!
downvote! downvote! I'm tired of hacker news proprietary loving bullshit
(except when the open source can somehow help them build proprietary
products).

~~~
nemo
The Xbox can also be damaged by hammers, but could be designed with a more
ruggedized case that could withstand that attack. If someone smashed a kid's
Xbox on Christmas with a hammer I wouldn't blame the design of the console,
I'd blame the creep with the hammer.

Seriously, you might not like MS, proprietary software, their business models,
or lots of other things about them, but don't go blaming them for some cretins
attacking their systems in a failed ploy to make a buck.

The Lizard script kiddies had a pretty horrible business model too, FWIW,
break into a bunch of systems across the internet to DDoS Xbox/PSN servers,
ruin a bunch of people's Christmas, and use the media coverage to sell their
DDoS as a service scheme.

~~~
rando3826
Yes, I will blame them. You make no compelling case otherwise. This is how the
internet works. If you run a server with security vunls that are well known
and patches available: it gets owned. It's your fault. Same type of situation
here.

~~~
nemo
"If you run a server with security vunls that are well known and patches
available: it gets owned. It's your fault."

It's not that MS was being lax about properly hardening their boxes, though.
You could DDoS the most hardened server out there, or a rack of them, it's
really an inherent design issue with TCP/IP that you can DDoS systems. It's
completely ignorant to blame MS, they didn't have a single point of failure,
they had blocks of auth servers nailed.

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bhouston
Brian Krebs is a master of publicity, often a little predictable though.

~~~
thirsteh
Is that supposed to be derogatory? Don't be peanut butter and jealous.

~~~
newaccountfool
I have to say that Brians recent posts seem a little pissy and childish in his
wordings. He also stated facts that are untrue such as that most of Lulzsec
are in jail...currently most of them are out and never served much time.

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sroerick
Hah, why does CNN have a "Happy Birthday Playstation" message on this page?

