Lizard Squad’s DDOS tool is a threat to all websites
Having managed to take down and disrupt the gaming network services of both Sony’s PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox Consoles over Christmas, the perpetrators known as Lizard Squad are now selling the tool it used to carry out these attacks to online criminals. This massively increases the likelihood of random attacks that could affect any and all businesses, creating a major computer security issue.
While they might not target you directly, any future assault on a major web concern such as Microsoft’s, Amazon’s or Google’s services could result in wider disruption across the web and affect the cloud computing tools that we all use. The members of Lizard Squad have created, or refined, common DDOS (distributed denial of service) tools that flood a web server with requests, so legitimate users can’t get through. This now means that any malcontent or web hooligan can deploy it, so expect a spike of these attacks in early 2015.
Larger businesses can employ anti-DDOS tools to limit and work around the damage, but for the humble user, until the attack subsides, we just have to sit and wait to access the service or data. To prepare for any potential DDOS attack, you must look at all the services you use, ensure you have local copies of any data that is stored on them. This could be downloading contacts from a cloud service, your emails from Google Gmail and any documents held in Microsoft’s Cloud or other service.
While the FBI and other agencies are hunting down the members of Lizard Squad, since their tool is now out there in the wild, available for a modest fee, even if they are arrested, the threat will not end until the bot net behind all the attacks is dismantled. We can only hope that there will be an easy way for Internet security teams to take down the net and remove the threat. However, even after Lizard Squad and its tool is consigned to history, more will spring up, so always make sure you have an alternative service to use should a DDOS attack hit your business.
