# Lizard Squad Lizard Squad is a black hat hacking crew that ran a string of high-profile DDoS attacks on gaming networks in 2014 and 2015, hitting League of Legends, Battle.net, PlayStation Network and Xbox Live[1][2]. Their August 2014 stunt of falsely claiming explosives on a Sony executive's American Airlines flight and their Christmas Day 2014 takedown of PSN and Xbox Live turned the group into one of the most notorious online crews of the mid-2010s[3][5]. ## Origin Lizard Squad's public run began on August 18th, 2014, when the @LizardSquad Twitter account claimed to have knocked League of Legends offline, followed the same day by an outage claim against RuneScape[6]. The next day, August 19th, the account said it had breached Riot Games enough to force a security upgrade and then boasted about taking Blizzard's Battle.net offline[6]. The group broke into mainstream news on August 24th, 2014, when a wave of DDoS traffic hit Sony's PlayStation Network. Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley confirmed the attack on Twitter, writing that the company was "under attack by a large scale ddos"[2]. Hours later, @LizardSquad tweeted at American Airlines claiming there were explosives on Smedley's Dallas to San Diego flight, and the plane was diverted to Phoenix for a security check before landing safely in San Diego[3][5]. - **Platform:** Twitter (@LizardSquad) / gaming networks - **Creator:** Lizard Squad (collective) - **Date:** 2014 ## Overview Lizard Squad worked mostly through distributed denial of service floods, in which a wave of junk traffic overwhelms a target's servers until legitimate players can't connect[3]. The group announced each hit on Twitter, usually from the @LizardSquad handle, then followed up with taunts, screenshots of downtime pages and photos of themselves posing in balaclavas[1]. Their targets were almost always big gaming platforms: Riot's League of Legends, Blizzard's Battle.net, Sony's PlayStation Network, Grinding Gear's Path of Exile and Microsoft's Xbox Live[1][2]. What pushed them past the usual script kiddie crew was the theatre around the attacks. They wrapped DDoS bragging in political trolling, at various points claiming attacks were tied to the bombing of ISIL and demanding companies stop being greedy with server budgets[2]. They also mixed in real-world stunts, including a fake bomb threat against a commercial flight, that dragged them into criminal investigations well beyond the usual gaming press cycle[3][5]. ## How It Spread After the Smedley flight incident, coverage jumped from gaming blogs to general tech and mainstream news, with TechCrunch calling it a stunt that was "not your typical DDOS attack" and CNET running a wire piece on the diversion of American Airlines Flight 362[5][3]. Shacknews tracked live updates as Lizard Squad rolled the attack across Battle.net, a Dota 2 stream, Xbox Live and other services throughout the day[1]. The @LizardSquad account tied the campaign to a political message, tweeting that "Kuffar don't get to play videogames until bombing of the ISIL stops" alongside #ISIS[2][6]. The group's biggest single moment was Christmas Day, December 25th, 2014, when they took down both Xbox Live and PlayStation Network for most of the day, ruining console gaming for millions of people who had just unwrapped new hardware[6]. That evening, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom publicly offered Lizard Squad 3,000 Mega lifetime premium accounts to stand down, then tweeted a screenshot showing the deal had gone through with the @LizardMafia account[6]. In an interview with The Daily Dot the next day, members using the aliases "Vinnie Omari" and "Ryan Cleary" claimed the Christmas DDoS peaked at 1.2 terabits per second[6]. Legal fallout landed on July 8th, 2015, when 17-year-old Finnish member Julius "zeekill" Kivimaki got a two-year suspended sentence, with no jail time, for 50,700 counts of aggravated computer break-ins[6]. Smedley called him a "piece of garbage" on Twitter, and within two days the @LizardLands account posted "Time for some more fun" before a fresh DDoS knocked Daybreak Games offline[6]. In April 2016, after Blizzard forced the private vanilla World of Warcraft server Nostalrius to shut down, @LizardLands retweeted images purporting to show personal emails of Blizzard employees and Blizzard customer service confirmed it was "monitoring a DDOS attack" on some of its games[6]. ## How to Use "Lizard Squad" is used less as a meme template and more as shorthand in gaming communities. When a big online service goes down around a holiday or major launch, players still joke that "Lizard Squad is back" even when the outage is unrelated[6]. The group's balaclava photos and their taunting @LizardSquad tweets are the images most often reposted in retrospectives about the 2014 to 2015 gaming outage era[1]. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Lizard Squad? Lizard Squad is a black hat hacking group best known for a run of DDoS attacks on major gaming networks starting in August 2014[1]. ### Where did Lizard Squad come from? They surfaced publicly on Twitter as @LizardSquad on August 18th, 2014, when they claimed responsibility for taking League of Legends and RuneScape offline[6]. ### What does Lizard Squad mean? The name refers to the crew itself, an anonymous group of hackers who signed their DDoS attacks and boasts with the Lizard branding across Twitter accounts like @LizardSquad and @LizardLands[6]. ### How do you use Lizard Squad? Gamers still invoke the name as shorthand whenever a big online service like PSN or Xbox Live goes down, echoing the 2014 to 2015 outages the group claimed[3]. ### Is Lizard Squad still popular? The group is not active in the way it was in 2014 and 2015, but it stays a classic reference point in gaming and cybersecurity coverage[6]. ### What did Lizard Squad do to John Smedley's flight? On August 24th, 2014, they tweeted at American Airlines claiming explosives were on Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley's flight, and the plane was diverted to Phoenix before continuing to San Diego[3]. ### Did Lizard Squad really take down PSN and Xbox Live on Christmas? Yes, on December 25th, 2014, they took credit for DDoS attacks that kept both Xbox Live and PlayStation Network mostly offline for the day[6]. ### What did Kim Dotcom offer Lizard Squad? Kim Dotcom publicly offered the group 3,000 Mega lifetime premium accounts to end the Christmas attacks and later tweeted a screenshot claiming the deal was accepted[6]. ### Was anyone from Lizard Squad arrested? Julius "zeekill" Kivimaki, a 17-year-old Finnish member, was convicted on July 8th, 2015 of 50,700 aggravated computer break-ins and given a two-year suspended sentence with no jail time[6]. ### Did Lizard Squad have a political motive? They framed some attacks as ISIL related, tweeting that "Kuffar don't get to play videogames until bombing of the ISIL stops," though outlets treated the claim skeptically[2]. ### How big was the Christmas 2014 attack? In a Daily Dot interview, members using the aliases Vinnie Omari and Ryan Cleary said the attack peaked at 1.2 terabits per second[6]. ## References 1. [https://www.shacknews.com/article/85951/blizzard-playstation-network-and-more-under-wide-ddos-attack-update-fbi-now-investigating]() 2. [https://web.archive.org/web/20160404101441/https://www.dailydot.com/esports/psn-blizzard-riot-ddos-attack/]() 3. [https://www.cnet.com/news/sony-says-playstation-network-back-online/]() 4. [https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/sony-playstation-hacked-by-lizard-squad-has-personal-user-information-been-compromised-1462502]() 5. [https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/24/playstation-network-suffers-ddos-attack-hackers-claim-to-have-grounded-soe-presidents-plane/]() 6. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/lizard-squad]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/lizard-squad Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library