Lizard Squad hackers get HACKED

Website offline and Twitter account suspended after series of cyberattacks

The Lizard Squad 'hackers' have been causing a lot of cyber mischief lately, but they've just got a taste of their own medicine. Their website has been taken offline and their Twitter account - @lizardmafia - has been suspended, with a branch of 'hacktivist' group Anonymous taking the credit.

The news was announced by Anonymous Protection with a tweet saying: “LizardSquad website has been cleaned out and is offline: lizardpatrol.com. LizardSquad Twitter is now suspended: @lizardmafia. We WIN.”

The Anonymous Protection group says it’s "dedicated to protect the people of the internet" and chose to take on Lizard Squad after the group made threats against Anonymous and carried out a number of denial of service cyberattacks (DDoS).

The cyberattacks took down a number of key websites, including Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network on Christmas day. The Lizards have since been using Twitter to advertise their "cyberattack-for-hire" service, Lizard Stresser.

Most recently Lizard Squad hacked Taylor Swift's Twitter account and threatened to release nude pictures.

Anonymous Protection seems to have delivered on its promise, taking down Lizard Squad’s website using a similar denial-of-service attack, and hammering Twitter with complaints so that social network took down the @lizardmafia account.

Twitter/@Lizardmafia

Lizard Squad Twitter page

Twitter doesn't comment on individual cases, but will take down accounts if they post other people’s private information without their permission or make threats. Twitter can also suspend accounts if they use the service “in furtherance of illegal activities”.

Facebook outage yesterday—a technical glitch, not a cyber attack

The Facebook outage yesterday, which lasted for about one hour, was an internal technical glitch, said Facebook in a statement on its website.

“This was not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems,” said the statement.

Facebook and its photo site Instagram were unavailable to its users between 7.15 pm and 8.15 pm NZ time across the United States, Europe and Asia.

The Facebook breakdown flooded Twitter with complains and jokes, with “#facebookdown”and “#SocialMeltdown2015” trending.

Some suggested Lizard Squad, a hacker group that claimed to attack Microsoft and Sony gaming networks over Christmas, were behind the outage. A twitter read, “Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad.”

For legions of users, it was just a blip while companies dependent upon Facebook, such as Tinder and over 75,000 other websites, were affected by the disruption.

A technical fault sounded more plausible than a cyberattack because a DDoS attack would have made sites inaccessible to its users rather than displaying an error message, said Guillermo Lafuente, security consultant at MWR InfoSecurity.

Additionally, the outage was global and had it been a cybercrime, the impact would have been localized to one particular area as Facebook has multiple data centers.

Facebook, headquartered at California, has more than 1.35 billion active users globally, with more than 80% of its users outside the US and Canada.

Facebook had suffered a massive outage in September 2010 that lasted for about 2.5 hours. Early then outages were common as the system was not robust. However, off late a Californian company, Menlo Park, routinely checks its infrastructure and resilience.

Taylor Swift’s Twitter and Instagram accounts hacked, apparently by Lizard Squad

 

A user affiliated with Lizard Squad appeared to briefly gain control of the Taylor Swift account, which has 51.4 million followers, and also took over the singer's Instagram account

A hacker affiliated with Lizard Squad appeared to have hacked Taylor Swift’s Twitter account this evening, posting messages that received thousands of retweets before they were removed.

One of the messages told users to follow a user with the handle @Lizzard.
That user’s Twitter biography claims to be a “leader of Lizard Squad”, as well as a number of other famous hacking groups such as LulzSec and Anonymous. The account posted a number of tweets apparently revelling in the hack this evening.

Yes, I'm currently dating @taylorswift13 
— トカゲ (@Lizzard) January 27, 2015

The posts stayed up for a matter of minutes before they were apparently removed, but not before they had received thousands of retweets and favourites.

Swift's Instagram account was also hit by the hack, sending out similar messages before they were also taken down.

While some of Swift's fans (known as Swifties) rushed to defend the singer, others asked hackers to follow them from the official account while it was compromised.

All tweets since January 25 were deleted, including all of those apparently posted by hackers.
On Swift's official Tumblr she wrote: "My Twitter got hacked but don’t worry, Twitter is deleting the hacker tweets and locking my account until they can figure out how this happened and get me new passwords.
"Never a dull moment.

 

Piratean las cuentas de Taylor Swift en Instagram y Twitter

EFE

Los Ángeles (EEUU) - Las cuentas de la cantante Taylor Swift en Instagram y Twitter fueron hoy pirateadas y usadas con la intención de vender una supuestas fotografías en las que aparecería la artista desnuda.

Los mensajes publicados en Twitter en nombre de Swift hacían referencia a @lizzard y @veriuser, dos perfiles que se asocian con un grupo de piratas informáticos conocidos como Lizard Squad, según publicó la web de información dedicada a los famosos TMZ.

Ambas cuentas fueron bloqueadas por Twitter pocos minutos después del incidente y los mensajes eliminados.

El perfil de Swift en Instagram sufrió un ataque poco después y los responsables de ese acto dijeron tener en su poder imágenes de Swift desnuda que estarían dispuestos a vender a cambio de un pago en moneda virtual Bitcoin, explicó el portal The Verge.

Al igual que en el caso de Twitter, la cuenta de la cantante en Instagram regresó a la normalidad pocos minutos después.

"Mi cuenta de Twitter fue pirateada, pero no se preocupen. Twitter está borrando los mensajes de los "hackers" y ha congelado mi cuenta hasta que descubran cómo ocurrió esto y me den nuevas contraseñas", escribió Swift en su blog en la red Tumblr.

La cantante, tras recuperar el control de sus redes sociales, envió un mensaje a los autores del pirateo.

"¿Piratas informáticos que dicen que tienen (mis) desnudos? ¡Ya os gustaría, verdad! Pasadlo bien editando mis fotos porque no tenéis nada", comentó la artista en Twitter.

Taylor Swift tiene más de 51 millones de seguidores en Twitter, una cifra que solo superan los cantantes Katy Perry (64 millones) y Justin Bieber (59 millones), así como el presidente de EE.UU., Barack Obama (53 millones), y más de 20 millones en Instagram.