In another attack on Xbox Live, hacker group Lizard Squad has apparently taken down the online gaming service and has claimed responsibility for the deed.
Owners of the Xbox 360 and Xbox One gaming console have reported difficulties in accessing Xbox Live, along with all the other online functions of the Xbox consoles. When gamers attempt to log on to Xbox Live, the consoles respond with a 80151909 error code, warning that the profile for Xbox Live failed to download.
While the difficulties are ongoing, the support site for the Xbox does not indicate that there are any problems with Xbox Live and the apps or services connected to it.
Most of the reports by gamers regarding the downtime for Xbox Live are being posted on forums and social media.
The service outage is probably not a problem with the online infrastructure of Microsoft.
Lizard Squad, through their official Twitter account, claimed that they were responsible for the attack on Xbox Live, which took the service offline. The hacker group describes itself as the "kings" of DDoS, or distributed denial-of-service attacks.
"That's a small dose of what's to come on Christmas," the group posted on their Twitter account, hinting that the hackers are preparing for a much larger attack on Xbox Live for the upcoming holiday.
The Lizard Squad has been behind several attacks, claiming responsibility for a similar attack on the PlayStation Network of Sony that also put the online gaming service offline. The hacker group also carried out DDoS attacks against standalone online games such as League of Legends and World of Warcraft.
One of the hacker group's more recent attacks was on the servers of hit game Destiny, as its popularity made it a very attractive hack target for the Lizard Squad.
The Lizard Squad has been successful in gaining attention with their DDoS attacks. Other hackers, however, belittle their efforts because DDoS attacks are not a particularly elegant way of hacking, with it being compared to "clogging a toilet."
In a DDoS attack, hackers coordinate to involve thousands of computer systems to simultaneously connect to a certain service, which would overwhelm the network due to the massive load.
The Lizard Squad has been very vocal with their attacks, regularly using their Twitter account to claim responsibility for the downtimes of online gaming services and even to taunt their victims. Their attacks could cost companies potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in terms of lost revenue and associated costs to repair the inflicted damage.
