Grouping Lizard Squad tried to attack Tor

Previously, hackers "put" the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live

The hacker grouping Lizard Squad aimed to attack the Tor network. About this they reported in their official Twitter account.

From their statement it follows that the attackers stopped the attack on the Xbox Live and PlayStation Network services and are now testing the zero-day vulnerability in Tor, a vulnerability for which the patch package does not yet exist. These words are somewhat different from what was actually done.

Apparently, Lizard Squad launches a set of Tor nodes with the names LizardNSA to listen to the traffic. “Hi, are you still handing out t-shirts to riley owners?” We need about 3000, ”they write .

Along with the Lizard Squad riley machines in Tor, there were about 8,000 , that is, a dangerous situation was created when almost half of the peer-to-peer network power belongs to someone.
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Theoretically, having a sufficient number of controlled nodes, it is possible to compromise the transmitted data by in-depth analysis. At the end of July this year, Tor had already reported a similar attack: an unknown person launched 100 nodes and with their help could get user information.

There are no reasons for concern: the new nodes for the first three days are almost never used . They are limited to transferring data at about 20 kilobytes per second.

The creators of Tor are not worried either: this is only a typical Sibyl attack, that is, the attackers are trying to add as many of their nodes to the network as possible. This is contrary to claims about “zero-day vulnerability testing.”


Image from Nadim Kobassi's microblog

Tor was created taking into account such situations: the peer-to-peer communication policy is built on distrust of individual nodes. Even after the appearance of thousands of new computers in the network, the total capacity of the Lizard Squad does not exceed the percentage of bandwidth - 3000 rileys make up only 0.2743%. The developers isolate these nodes from the Tor network, which puts an end to the noisy statements of Lizard Squad.

On December 19, the Tor team spoke about the possibility of an upcoming attack on the network , then it was about disabling the key servers involved in distributing the list of transit nodes connecting. It is unknown if there is any connection with the efforts of the Lizard Squad.

Earlier this week, Lizard Squad successfully launched the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live gaming networks . It seems that hackers have too many controllable machines that you want to do with something.

It was a 1200 Gbit / s DDoS attack, and the time for its implementation was chosen very specifically: December 25 in America and many other countries open Christmas presents, which can be the latest-generation PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles. Like all modern entertainment electronics, game consoles are highly dependent on the Internet connection and the availability of a connection to the “native” services, which disabled December 25.

It's funny that Kim Dotcom partially saved the situation. Judging by the screenshots he published, he gave the hackers gift vouchers for a place in the cloud-based hosting of Mega files with the condition to stop the attack on Xbox Live.