Lizard Squad was a black hat hacking group, mainly known for their claims of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks[1] primarily to disrupt gaming-related services.

[3][4] On April 30, 2016, Cloudflare published a blog post detailing how cyber criminals using this group's name were issuing random threats of carrying out DDoS attacks.

[5][6] As a result of this, the British National Fraud Intelligence Bureau issued an alert warning businesses not to comply with ransom messages threatening DDoS attacks.

[7][8] Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility for launching a string of DDoS attacks against high-profile game-related services over the course of a few months in late 2014.

According to Tor relay node operator Thomas White, the consensus system made that Lizard Squad only managed to control "0.2743% of the network, equivalent to a tiny VPS".

[24] Media reports around the world said versions of the takeover in some regions included the wording "ISIS will prevail", which listed concerns of Lizard Squad's association with the Islamic State.

[27] On August 24, 2014, Lizard Squad claimed that a plane on which the president of Sony Online Entertainment, John Smedley, was flying (American Airlines Flight 362), had explosives on board.

[31][32] Facebook later released a statement saying its own engineers were to blame, and that the disruption to its services was not the result of a third-party attack, but instead occurred after they introduced a change that affected their configuration systems.

[40] 19-year-old Zachary Buchta (fbiarelosers) from Maryland, has been charged with computer crimes associated with a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, stolen credit cards and selling DDoS-for-hire services.

He was one of the members behind LizardSquad and also the Co-Group "PoodleCorp" which launched distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against multiple networks, YouTubers and gaming services.

[41][42][43][44] 19-year-old Bradley Jan Willem van Rooy (UchihaLS) from the Netherlands, has been charged with computer crimes associated with a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, stolen credit cards and selling DDoS-for-hire services.