A British citizen who appears to be linked to the notorious hacker group, Lizard Squad , claiming responsibility for the attacks on Sony's PlayStation Network and Microsoft's Xbox Live, leaving gamers offline on Christmas Day, has been arrested by UK police.
Lizard Squad launched a simultaneous distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network on December 25, 2014. It then offered to sell its own Lizard DDoS script, for hire, which it called Stresser Lizard.
As part of the investigation, the UK Regional Organised Crime Unit, in collaboration with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), arrested an 18-year-old teenager in Southport, near Liverpool, on Friday morning, and his electronic and digital devices were seized.
This is the second arrest to be made in connection with the attack after Thames Valley Police arrested a 22-year-old man, named as Vinnie Omari, believed to be a member of Lizard, during raids on his London home, where phones, laptops and an Xbox console were reportedly seized.
In recent months, the Lizard Squad hackers have become a notorious hacking group, and are responsible for some high-profile DDoS attacks against popular gaming networks, including EA games Destiny and Xbox Live. A DDoS attack essentially floods the targeted network with a huge number of fake web connections, forcing the network to shut down and making the site inaccessible to legitimate users.
In this case, the result of the DDoSmeant that gamers on Sony's PlayStation Network and Microsoft's Xbox Live were unable to access the online services.
