Infamous Internet villains Lizard Squad are at it again. A group of cybercriminals, who most notably target gaming servers with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, have turned their attention to the United Kingdom’s political system. The cybercrime gang apparently have a particular disdain for the UK’s Labour Party, as they seem to be solely focusing their efforts on them. The first shots were fired, as the UK publication The Independent reports, when Lizard Squad admitted to the “sophisticated and large-scale” cyberattacks against Labour servers. According to party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the cyberattacks failed as the Labour servers have “robust security systems.”
The reasons that Lizard Squad gave for the DDoS attacks were posted on their Twitter account:
Today’s DDoS attack on the Labour Party is to show that no terrorist supporting government should allow to rule a country. Our botnet is connected to millions of devices around the world to enable more power to process such attacks.
Further tweets show the group acting like the trolls they are known to be in the hacking community, going so far as to taunt Jeremy Corbyn by stating:
Hi
@jeremycorbyn, noticed any changes in your bank recently?
It appears that, as the aforementioned tweet indicates, the group is now focusing in on the Labour leader exclusively. In private messages with The Independent, one member of Lizard Squad stated the following:
If Labour do win the election, you can expect the whole of the government and Labour websites to go offline… Jeremy Corbyn’s family members’ personal accounts have been compromised and their home internet is under a DDoS attack as we speak.
Lizard Squad has proven to be, in my opinion as a cybersecurity researcher and penetration tester, nothing more than trolls who want to sew chaos. Just imagine the morons on 4chan with a botnet and you get a pretty good idea of who Lizard Squad are. They don’t have many legitimate hacking abilities like APT28 or Lazarus. Rather, they merely exist to be a nuisance by employing DDoS attacks against high profile targets to get attention.
It is a double-edged sword reporting on them, as DDoS attacks against major targets cannot be ignored. But this gives the plonkers the exact attention they want. Whatever proposed political aims of these recent campaigns against the Labour Party are, it is highly likely that this is merely a smokescreen. Botnet users like Lizard Squad do everything for the lulz and not much else.
And we are laughing at them.
Featured image: Flickr/Emil
