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February 3, 2015

Lizard Squad regroups amid Anonymous civil war

Hackers continue to target PlayStation and Xbox as rivals squabble.

By Jimmy Nicholls

Lizard Squad has regrouped following the shutdown of several Twitter accounts and repeated attacks on its websites by rival hackers Anonymous.

Partial service to the group’s Lizard Stresser website was restored over the weekend as several Twitter accounts were set up purporting to be manned by the hackers, who appear to be unrepentant after their temporary outage.

Since relaunching, Lizard Squad has seemingly returned to targeting the PlayStation Network (PSN) and Xbox Live, both frequent victims of its attention throughout December, and has continued posting obscene and mocking material to its feeds on Twitter and Facebook.

It has also resumed its feud with security reporter Brian Krebs, who appears in a Matrix spoof image on the Lizard Stressor website. The blogger’s site was previously attacked by the group in distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that lasted several days.

Despite this a subsidiary site linked the group, Mega Vouchers for Bitcoins, has been defaced and remains offline at the time of writing, even though the hackers say proceeds from voucher sales are going to civil rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The controversy over Lizard Squad also appears to have stirred up a civil war within Anonymous, with OpLizardSquad accusing Anonymous Protection of falsely taking credit for the takedown of the group.

Anonymous Protection has stood by its claims, claiming the attack on the DDoS tool Lizard Stresser was a joint effort. "Those who are saying we are taking credit for other people’s work don’t know how the attacks work," it said on Twitter.

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The group has also claimed that a number of the supposed Anonymous accounts on Twitter are in fact run by people who also control Lizard Squad accounts.

"A lot of the other Anonymous accounts which tweet hate to us are the same harmless, jealous person using multiple accounts," it added.

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