Lizard Squad was at it again yesterday, attacking Electronic Arts and causing some unexpected spill over in Sweden. Lizard Squad has been attacking gaming company's that rely on internet lately, and last night added Electronic Arts to the list with another DDOS that took out EA's servers for several hours last night.
However, their attack on Electronic Arts had what appears to have been an unanticipated side effect. In their DDOSing of EA, their attack ran into what was a server installation error of one of Sweden's major internet providers - Telia. With over 1.2 million residential customers, Telia's servers were hit some in the attack, though thankfully they didn't completely crash. Many Swedish people had no internet due to the attack for several hours, and thousands of people had issues and slowdowns with the internet due to the attack. Telia released a statement apologizing for the issues and saying they will do their best to fix it.
The Swedish Board of Telecommunications called an emergency meeting to discuss the issue and look into what could be done about stopping future attacks. They plan to ask around the industry to see what protections they can put in place against this, and one can imagine that they might be looking at company liability for improper installations.
As for Lizard Squad, they put up a tweet after Electronic Arts crashed that was pretty straight forward in claiming the "credit" for the situation.
https://twitter.com/LizardPatrol/status/542914336814280704
It does look like Lizard Squad isn't planning on stopping any time soon with the attacks. Looking around some, I came across their manifesto which I have copied here over from a Pastebin:
WHY #LizardSquad / #LizardPatrol DOES WHAT THEY DO...The point is ~Xbox Live, PSN, etc are run by multi-billion dollar corporations eg: Microsoft & Song. These corps spend utter shit on the users gaming experience. The fact a sizable Botnet can shutdown their services is an embarrassment, it's pitiful. By disrupting the gaming networks it is shoving the fact that the gaming experience is important, and the companies running the show have to do better in their faces. Yes services will go down for a few hours, maybe 3-4-5x but in the end if the service eg: Xbox live wishes to stay online they will be forced to upgrade their product which will create a better online experience for everyone.
Essentially you are sacrificing a few hours of downtime for a highly improved quality of service when all is done and said. And course it's also for the lulz, our new mascot does an excellent job of just that: https://twitter.com/LizardPatrol/status/542342883521875969
So if you were wondering why... apparently they think it will force EA, Microsoft, Sony to invest more. Also, more or less because they can.
Thanks to Marc Henriksen for translating the Swedish articles
What do you think of Lizard Squad's continued attacks on game companies? Do you think it will have the impact their manifesto claims to want? Do you think the Swedes are overreacting to a single DDOS?
