Alleged PlayStation Network, Xbox Live cyberattackers arrested by U.K. law enforcement

Jeff Grubb
Updated
The U.K. equivalent of the FBI claims it has arrested the cyberattackers responsible for the PSN and Xbox Live holiday attacks.
The U.K. equivalent of the FBI claims it has arrested the cyberattackers responsible for the PSN and Xbox Live holiday attacks.

Updated at 2:45 p.m. with a statement from the group claiming to be Lizard Squad.

The long arm of the law is also patient and persistent — as customers of the cyberattack group Lizard Squad has just learned.

The United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency (NCA) has arrested six teenagers (via Variety) who were bought access to the tool that cyberattackers used to allegedly barrage the Xbox Live and PlayStation Network online services during the end-of-December holidays last year. That assault resulted in Xbox Live going offline on Christmas day while PlayStation Network suffered a week-long outage. The tool is called Lizard Stresser, and it is the primary tool of the aforementioned cyberattack group which is better known as Lizard Squad. That group has also taken credit for attacking several other online services, including the World of Warcraft and Amazon servers.

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If Lizard Stresser sounds like something a bunch of teen Internet vandals would use, there’s a good reason for that. It turns out that most were actually teen Internet vandals.

“A third of the individuals identified are under the age of 20,” reads a post on the NCA’s website. “And the activity forms part of the NCA’s wider work to address younger people at risk of entering into serious forms of cybercrime.”

While this is a big win for law enforcement, it does not look like the NCA was able to capture everyone related to Lizard Squad as the groups account on Twitter is still actively tweeting about this latest incident.

The NCA also shared information about the individuals it executed warrants on. These include three legal minors ranging in age from 15 years old to 17 years old. That’s in addition to three 18 year olds. All of these young people are male and are accused of using a tool referred to as “Lizard Stresser” (which we wrote about in depth right here) to target websites.

The Lizard Squad account on Twitter did reach out to make the claim to us that none of its core members were actually arrested.

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