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Comment by higherpurpose | Hacker News Reader

3 months later: "LizardSquad informant working for FBI for the past 6 months".

The LizardSquad thing seems to have a lot of parallels with Lulzsec. Both groups "appeared all of the sudden" on the online scene. Both tried to make a lot of noise in the shortest time possible, seemingly "just for fame", with no long term plan or vision for why they started doing that in the first place. Both started giving interviews to the media.

It almost reminds me of all those fake terror plots the FBI is creating to keep people scared, by finding naive people to turn them into terrorists, and then "set them loose" onto the world, to remind people terrorists - or in this case, cybercriminals - still exist.

Maybe I'm just way off the mark here. Hopefully I am.

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The FBI does have a history of finding impressionable people, encouraging them to misbehave, getting a few to be informants and arresting the rest. While definitely misguided it seems to me that the heart of what many of them are trying to do is in the right place.

One example of many: http://nypost.com/2014/07/20/newburgh-four-terrorism-case-wa...

How does that example show that their "heart ... is in the right place"? All of the men made it clear that they would only participate if no one got hurt, and one of them was doing so to fund his brother's cancer treatment.

If you're broke and faced with the death of a beloved family member, and then someone comes along and offers you $250k and a guarantee that no one gets hurt, it's hard for me to believe that most people wouldn't participate.

Eventually you believe your grocer is FBI and stop eating fresh food. Any dipshit can run LOIC but it must be an FBI plot. FFS.

I think it is ridiculous to point fingers at this point, but he has a point - something is fishy about Lizard Squad.

Here are the facts that I know of:

1. Lizard Squad is fairly new.

2. They managed to bring down PSN and XBL.

3. They make some noise in the tor community with their nodes.

4. They are complete amateurs at OPSEC and they love talking to the reporters.

You can accomplish #2 and #3 by either being good or having money to buy botnets.

re: 1 The Lizard script-kiddies have been around for a while: http://krebsonsecurity.com/?s=darkode&x=0&y=0

They have been working on building a group of script-kiddies who learn how to DDOS for a couple years at least. That's enough time to get enough bots to DDOS PSN and XBL.

They announced a business to hire out their DDOS "services" just after the PSN/XBL attacks.

They are a bunch of script-kiddies with knowledge of one skill, DDOSing, which has a very low learning curve. It goes with the territory that they'd be complete amateurs at OPSEC. They were hyping themselves as part of a money making scheme, of course they were looking for as much media attention as possible.

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