Here’s how Lizard Squad allegedly brought down the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live

Security site KrebsonSecurity is back at it again, this time revealing how hacker group the Lizard Squad allegedly brought down Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network over Christmas.

Krebs says Lizard Squad was able to attack both services via distributed denial of service (DDoS) because of a network of hacked consumer-grade routers.

Defiantly labeling Lizard Squad a “group of young hoodlums,” Krebs says the group tapped into “thousands of hacked home internet routers” to achieve the DDoS attack. Krebs reports from personal experience.

“In the first few days of 2015, KrebsOnSecurity was taken offline by a series of large and sustained denial-of-service attacks apparently orchestrated by the Lizard Squad,” the site reported. “As I noted in a previous story, the booter service — lizardstresser[dot]su — is hosted at an internet provider in Bosnia that is home to a large number of malicious and hostile sites.”

Krebs tracked the Bosnian host’s IP addresses to a Lizard Squad’s botnet controller.

“In addition to turning the infected host into attack zombies, the malicious code uses the infected system to scan the Internet for additional devices that also allow access via factory default credentials, such as ‘admin/admin,’ or ‘root/12345’. In this way, each infected host is constantly trying to spread the infection to new home routers and other devices accepting incoming connections (via telnet) with default credentials.”

Krebs reported that the stunt was merely that, meant to advertise a DDoS botnet that’s about to be sold via an online portal. Said botnet is advertised as being able to take out any IP address on the internet. For a fee, of course.

You can head to Kreb’s article for tips on how to secure your router so you won’t end up an unwitting ally in Lizard Squad’s attacks.