Kim Dotcom Stops Xbox and Playstation Attacks | Hacker News Reader

Kim Dotcom Stops Xbox and Playstation Attacks

torrentfreak.com

76 pointsdojo99933 comments

So, any group of kids with access to one-click DDOS tools can extort $300,000USD worth of services out of a business by attacking large networks?

Is Kim really that proud of this precedent?

Will a $300k ransom be enough next time?

Maybe that's the future of high uptime public networks, an understanding that millions or even tens of millions per year must be set aside for bribes.

Sounds a bit like driving through a corrupt country where one must keep bribes on hand at all times to ensure non-molested travel.

Except it's not really $300,000 worth of actual services. If I stuck a $300,000 price tag on a rock and used that as a ransom does not mean they got away with $300,000 worth of stuff. Plus all their groups information has been leaked (http://www.lizardsquad.info), so I put this down to kids with too much bandwidth rather than a precedent setting event.

They didn't extort it out of him, he offered it. If they actually asked for it in return for stopping the attack, then it's extortion.

"can extort $300,000USD worth of services out of a business"

That's not the value. It's probably going to cost around 50k to 100k

I certainly don't agree with the precedent, though

Value is complicated but "cost" alone isn't the full picture.

Question: how did you calculate the cost of a lifetime membership to something? I'd be curious to see the numbers.

Either way, most tax systems allow the full cost + 1/2 of the difference between cost and fair market value as a tax deduction (the US does it that way, I bet other anglo-derived systems like Australia is similar), which changes the math a little too.

This kind of stuff is really upsetting. If you don't want people to do this kind of thing, you have to not encourage them. Even if they are all arrested, others will see this. And think, Hey I can get a reward for doing this stuff.

A 10 sec look at their twitter feed will tell you that they are doing this primarily to make a name for themselves. They want to be famous.

Yet what does every single news outlet do? Plaster their groups name all over every story. Even the BBC goes to mention them by name. Which is only going to encourage this behavior.

>Yet what does every single news outlet do?

What they're supposed to? This is after all, news. You don't drop a story because you think someone is a cunt.

You report it, as news, saying "a hacker group". You don't have to report the name of the group. There's something called "Journalism ethics and standards", that includes stuff like not reporting a victim's name or in a lot of cases not broadcasting the videos terrorist groups send out.

You want to see something scary, start to look at how media coverage affects mass shootings. There is very strong evidence to support the idea that our current media coverage of making these people "famous" increases the deadliness of these events as compared to something like the North Hollywood Shootout.

I rather disagree--it's already basically trivial to fabricate as much news as we want; removing the burden of proof and specific naming makes it almost impossible to fact-check anything (and even then, in the pathological case, details can be made up, but I digress).

Allowing agencies to not report details that can be independently verified makes for worse news and better propeganda.

So you're saying that The Washington Post shouldn't have reported on Watergate, with Deep Throat? If you can't trust the people providing the news, then citing sources doesn't change that fact. This is why you have collaborating sources, this is why you vet stories, and this is why you build trust with your readers. They could have linked to their source, and still not NAMED the group. Its the name that gets added to google search, not the sources.

What they're supposed to? This is after all, news.

I think the point is that you just don't publish the names of the groups responsible for the attacks. The truly interested (security professionals, law enforcement) can go dig for the group names, other people don't really need to know, and likely don't care anyway.

You say "a group of hackers" or whatever and don't name them. Similarly with serial killers, school shootings, or anything of that nature you simply don't say the name. Psychologists have been saying for years that doing so only encourages copy cats, because they want to be in the media spotlight.

Are you sure about your last sentence? The last time I checked, all that news did was eavesdrop and classify everyone as a cunt, because those news sell.

The attacks against the Playstation Network have slowed, but PSN is still offline in the US.

I'm curious about the nature of these attacks. Are they using sheer network traffic or are they tying up the authentication servers with bogus requests? Has anyone seen a good technical description of what's happening?

Looks like Mega requires an email address for account creation (and activation?). I'm sure many of these folks will be using disposable accounts, but some of them will probably use an email address that can be traced back, particularly if they're thinking in terms of keeping a lifetime account.

Seems to me that the list of email addresses associated with the 3000 lifetime account activations would be fair game for civil or criminal subpoenas.

Is there any reason to believe this wasnt for publicity and to get his message about diplomacy out? He definitely has the resources to do this.

I will allow for a slight chance that he really did sincerely just want to play Xbox/Playstation yesterday.

I think it's pretty likely. Kim is one of the top Call of Duty players in the world for Xbox, and is known to be a very avid gamer.

The publicity sure doesn't hurt, either.

Also the history. He is a scammer and con artist.

On one hand I don't like the idea of surrendering to criminals, especially when you're giving them some kind of compensation, but on the other hand it's likely most or all of them will be arrested in the not-so-distant future. It's probably a net benefit if you appease them in the short term so they can cause as little damage as possible before they end up going away for good.

>but on the other hand it's likely most or all of them will be arrested in the not-so-distant future

People have been saying this for 3-4 months now.

Take a look at the following Twitter: https://twitter.com/finestsquad

At least one of them, a 17-year-old from Canada, has already been arrested.

The personal information of most of the rest of the group has already been publicly spread by "Finest Squad" and sent to law enforcement (though I imagine law enforcement probably already knows who most of them are, especially if other random Internet users can find their names and addresses so easily).

At that point it's just a matter of monitoring and building up a strong enough case.

What's there to back up the legitimacy of the information released by these guys?

It just looks like they're tweeting out random IPs from zeustracker.

If you're familiar with some of the script kiddie communities these people hang out in, it's not that hard to check their work.

It's quite possible they got a few wrong; I have not independently confirmed the information and I'm not sure anyone else has. One can clearly tell what sort of individuals the perpetrators are, though, and US law enforcement typically does not have a lot of trouble identifying and rounding up egotistical script kiddies. Look at LulzSec and all the copycats.

Feel free to put my comment on a calendar: I'd bet a fair bit of money that 75% or more of the group will be arrested before Christmas of 2015.

All "finestsquad" seems to have done is doxed various people the lizardsquad twitter has followed over time, I doubt they're stupid enough to follow themselves.

That is not what they have done at all.

These aliases and information are present on channels far away from Twitter.

Given Kim his past there is no reason to not believe he is not behind this by either 1) seeding it for publicity or 2) working with law enforcement (those accounts will be used/sold once).

There are reports of people still having difficulties accessing PSN. I don't know if Sony's network needs more time to recover or what the deal is at this point.

What's to keep another group from firing off a second DDOS and letting the Lizard group take the blame for it?

Now Dotcom can pull his goodies back while the Lizards have to (somehow) publicly prove they weren't going back on their deal.

From the bleachers, this looks like a lot of fun actually.

I think it's unlikely that there are many more untraceable über hackers out there with the resources to take down the gaming networks.

I thought these days you could pretty much purchase a DDOS on the open market from the botnet owners.

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;

  But we've  proved it again and  again,

That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld

  You never get rid of the Dane.

Haters gonna hate, but I think it was a cool thing Kim Dotcom did. I think it's time to put my Mega account to use.

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