The various console gaming services are slowly stuttering their way back online—Xbox Live, at least, appears to be up, though the Playstation Network is still having some trouble after yesterday's big outage for both services. And the group allegedly responsible for bringing them down, the hacker collective known as Lizard Squad, is still taking credit for the outage.
It's also allegedly moving on to a new target: Tor.
Though one Lizard Squad twitter account says the group has since stopped any attack they might have been pushing against Microsoft or Sony—perhaps as a result of getting a pretty good deal-slash-bribe from Kim Dotcom, as was previously alleged—that's not necessarily keeping anyone else from adopting the Lizard Squad name and carrying on. In fact, it's not really clear just who, or what, is doing anything right now. For all we know, the Playstation Network could simply still be down right now due to holiday popularity.
As for Tor, someone (or some people) affiliated with Lizard Squad—or appreciative enough of their efforts to use their name—seems to be going after the anonymous browsing network right now. One of the Lizard Squad Twitter accounts seems to confirm this fact: "To clarify, we are no longer attacking PSN or Xbox. We are testing our new Tor 0day."
If you fire up a Tor Network Map, you'll see that there are a ton of new relays starting with the name "LizardNSA." While that won't likely impact your Tor-based browsing just yet, these 3,000 to 6,000 new relays could theoretically start tracking Tor users' traffic if they make it past Tor's early bandwidth caps for new relays. It's been done before with far fewer relays.
On the plus side, at least Lizard Squad hasn't devised a way to bring down Tor, right? It could be… worse? Lizard Squad hasn't indicated exactly why it's targeting Tor, though we're guessing it's not for free merchandise.
"Hi, do you guys still give away shirts for relay owners? We need about 3000 @torproject," tweeted @LizardMafia.
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