Remember Lizard Squad? Yes, a group of DDoS attackers who caused havoc by attacking tech giants, gaming servers, and small businesses back in 2014. Apparently, the people who created Lizard Squad were also behind creating PoodleCorp group who took things to a whole new level by hacking YouTube accounts of popular celebrities and conducting DDoS against gaming giants.
Attacks and scams
In 2016, two men, Zachary Buchta, 20 (founding member of the group) from Maryland, United States and Bradley Jan Willem van Rooy, 19 from the Netherlands were arrested and charged by the United States Department of Justice with credit card theft, compromising protected computers and operating DDoS services using a DDoS tool “LizardStresser.”
Zachary Buchta
The group also hijacked surveillance cameras and used them for targeting government as well as banking websites. Butcha also blackmailed people over the phone and charged $20 fee from clients. One of his victim from Chicago received non-stop calls for 30 days. “Your target will be left with only 3 options. Change their number, Bend to your whim, deal with a ringing phone for the length of our attack :\,” Butcha told his clients.
lizard squad is dead, it's staying dead, and its disappointing me that there's so many fake hacker groups you will never be us
— Lizard Squad (@LizardLands) December 20, 2017
According to a censored example call released by the DOJ “Better look over your [expletive] back because I don’t flying [expletive] if we have to burn your [expletive] house down, if we have to [expletive] track your [expletive] family down, we will [expletive] your [expletive] up [expletive]”.
Pleading Guilty
Now, the good news is that Buchta who also targeted HackRead.com has been kicked to two and half year prison after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit damage to computers. Buchta also agreed to pay a sum of $350,000 to two online gambling companies who were affected by attacks planned and carried by Lizard Squad.
Lizard Squad’s victims
Among others, some of the most noted victims of the cybercrime group were British National Crime Agency Site (details), Blizzard servers (details), Steam servers (details) PlayStation and Xbox (details).
PoodleCorp’s victims
PoodleCorp came in the news after hacking and defacing the official YouTube account of WatchMojo, Redmercy, LeafyisHere, and Lil
Source: ChicagoTribune
