8chan, related sites go down in Lizard Squad-powered DDoS

On Thursday, the recent Lizard Squad tour of Internet infamy continued as the hacking group took credit for a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against the imageboard site 8chan. As of publication, 8chan.co is still inaccessible throughout the United States. Japanese sibling site 2ch.net, which also suffered an outage, was restored once 8chan's servers were "separated from the rest of the network," according to 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan's Twitter account.

In claiming credit for the attack, Lizard Squad pointed to its own recently launched service known as Lizard Stresser, which allows third parties to essentially hire Lizard Squad to DDoS the website of their choice. Users can pay anywhere from $6 to $500 to access the attack service, which then offers attack bursts that can last as long as 500 minutes concurrently.

Investigative reporter Brian Krebs recently profiled Lizard Squad in a story headlined Lizard Kids: A Long Trail of Fail. He said the group's Stresser service was lifted in its entirety from another more established DDoS-for-hire site. He also found Lizard Squad inadvertently exposed information about all 1,700 of its registered users.

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