Hacking group Lizard Squad claim to be behind online attacks which brought down numerous social networking sites and apps yesterday, including Facebook and Instagram, though the companies impacted are denying that this is the case.
Yesterday the Lizard Squad posted the tweet “Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad” on their Twitter account, as all five of the sites/apps were experiencing downtime. Facebook was offline for 58 minutes, causing #FacebookDown to trend worldwide. However, a spokesperson for Facebook, which also owns Instagram, made a statement saying the outage was “not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems.”
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Tinder and Hipchat’s reliance on Facebook to provide user information was likely the cause for their outage, though Tinder made light of the situation, sending a tweet this morning saying: “EVERYBODY PANIC! #Blizzard? North Korea? #TindernetApocalypse.” Lizard Squad also claimed that they had taken down Myspace, but at the time of this writing the site is running fine. Also, no one cares about MySpace.
Though Facebook has reassured its users that the site’s outage wasn’t due to a distribution denial of service (DDoS) attack from Lizard Squad, the same method which the group employed on Christmas Day to take down PlayStation Network and Xbox Live, they appear to have maintained that they are the individuals responsible, with them posting a tweet suggesting that Twitter would be the next social networking service in their sights if they didn’t use it “to communicate.”
An alleged member of Lizard Squad taunts the group’s detractors.
Continuing to bait those impacted by the downtime, an alleged member of the group posted an image of himself on Twitter, with him holding up a piece of paper with the message “dox me” written on it. Doxxing is the act of a user’s personal information being obtained and distributed online, and considering that there have been multiple reports of members of Lizard Squad having been arrested for the PSN/Xbox Live attacks, among other things, this is certainly a ballsy/silly move.
All of the sites/apps effected by the outage are now back up and fully functioning. Lizard Squad made the headlines again recently when a tool they released in order to allow people to DDoS websites of their choosing had the usernames/passwords of its users leaked.
