Kim Dotcom's gift to the hackers behind the attacks on Sony PlayStation's and Microsoft's Xbox networks brought temporary relief, but it serves as a bad example in the long term.
Kim Dotcom created an unlikely Christmas story. He bought Lizard Squad to stop the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that brought down Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox networks on Christmas Day. Thanks to Dotcom, Christmas was saved. Long live Kim Dotcom!
Everyone wins here, right? Players can play again. Lizard Squad gets 3,000 free coupons from Kim Dotcom for the encrypted cloud storage service, Mega. Priced at $99 each, if these coupons hit the market for $50, Lizard Squad will earn $150,000. Of course, Kim Dotcom promotes the event in the media to further boost his massive profile.
No, not everyone wins.
Some criminals who seek attention for their criminal behavior were retaliated against. There was an amplification of particular worldviews about how the information security industry works. In short, the underlying message is that you pay for crime. Useless. All of this can naturally inspire others, which is the last thing we need, given that DDoS attacks have been steadily increasing in number and size in recent years.
Last month, independent news sites in Hong Kong reported DDoS attacks that reached 500 gigabits per second, reports ZDNet.
“[It] is the biggest of any attack we have ever seen, and we have seen some of the biggest attacks on the Internet,” said Cloudflare chief Matthew Prince to Forbes.
Lizard Squad claim that their attacks on Sony and Microsoft reached 1.2 terabits per second – more than double the size of the Hong Kong attacks. If this is true, it means these guys are definitely smart. But their media interviews – we previously noted that they seek attention – reveal what one can say as politely as possible, you little brat.
“Microsoft and Sony are fucking retarded, literally monkeys behind computers,” said the Lizard Squad to the Daily Dot. “They would have better luck if they actually hired someone who knew what they were doing. Like, if they went around prisons and hired people who were convicted for stuff like this, they would have a better chance at preventing attacks.”
“We have a team of people with truly special abilities, and we have gained access to some of the core routing equipment of the Internet” they said to Daily Dot.
«We have some devices that connect to the submarine cables that facilitate the internet connecting the United States and Europe. We have access to some of the devices that are located in the middle of the ocean, and provide 100 gigabit per second. Not even the Russian government has carried out attacks of this magnitude.”
The two most tragic about all this
First, these attacks are really a battle between two rival hacker groups, the Lizard Squad and The Finest Squad. As Polygon, this battle has been going on for a month. There's no noble rivalry here, just some young people trying to prove they're as good as they claim to be.
This battle is what fuels many DDoS attacks. According to Akamai's report on the Internet for the third quarter of 2014, a percentage of about 34% of DD0S attacks are directed at the online entertainment industry.
“Online attacks in the entertainment industry are usually driven by players seeking to gain a competitive advantage over other players and by malicious actors aiming to steal personal data from players. In some cases, malicious entities fuel attacks to attract media attention or to gain a bad reputation among peer groups,” says Akamai.
Secondly, Lizard Squad consider that what they do is completely normal. In an interview on the BBC radio it was reported that the granting of Mega coupons to stop the attack was “dirty, and they seemed greedy” The hackers replied “Well, that's how it is. This happens in security businesses.”
So yes, Kim Dotcom stopped the attacks on Christmas day, and parents around the world were and are grateful. But the future is coming and all this probably won't end well.
