PSN and XBL Hackers Get Hacked Themselves

In a rather amusing ironic twist, Lizard Squad, the hacking collective who claimed responsibility for the Christmas Day PlayStation Network and Xbox Live hacks, have just been on the receiving end of a hack of their own systems.

Shortly after crippling the online gaming networks of both Sony and Microsoft, Lizard Squad used its new-found reputation to establish a service that allowed paying clients to nominate a website of their choice to be taken down in a similar fashion.

Unfortunately for Lizard Squad and their unscrupulous clients, this “boot-for-hire” service was hacked by an unknown source, exposing the Squad’s client list of 14,241 people. Ironically, despite Lizard Squad hacking XBL and PSN to expose their security inadequacies, the group themselves demonstrated lax protocol of their own when the client list was revealed to have been stored in plain text.

The IP addresses of said clients were also poorly obscured, and could easily be traced back to them with a little work.

The news was broken by internet security expert Brian Krebs, stalwart opponent of Lizard Squad whose own site was one of the nominees on Lizard Squad’s boot for hire list. Additionally, according to Ars Technica, a popular target for the Squad’s clients was Minecraft’s servers.

In more recent news, British police arrested an 18-year-old individual with alleged ties to Lizard Squad. His identity has not been officially revealed by the police, but the Daily Mail has identified him as Jordan Lee Bevan.

Kerwin Tsang: Kerwin has been a gamer for almost as long as he's been alive, ever since he received a Sega Mega Drive in 1989. Having graduated to the upper echelons of PC gaming, he now boasts a number of major gaming accomplishments. These include getting through all three Deus Ex games without killing anyone, clocking in over 700 hours of gameplay time in Skyrim without ever finishing the main story, and nearly shattering every bone in his hand from punching the wall when his soldiers in XCOM missed a shot with 95% chance to hit.
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