Hacker group LizardSquad used home routers to attack Xbox and Playstation game servers

Does your router still have the login credentials of ‘admin’ for the username and ‘admin’ for the password? If so, shame on you! In all seriousness, the rising hacker group known as ‘LizardSquad‘ caused serious waves amongst gamers over the Chritmas holidays by disrupting gaming services for Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network. Now, researchers and security analysts discovered that the group turned home routers into zombies to use as slaves to conduct the massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on the gaming servers.

The Walking Dead – Home Router Edition!

The hacker group turned home routers into bot zombies – compromised systems that wait for the zombie master to call on them to do their master’s bidding. It sits and waits patiently, still conducting its normal day to day duties as if it was never compromised. When the master calls upon his bot zombies, they spring into action conducting a massive DDoS attack on a target by the master’s choosing. In this case, our beloved Xbox Live and PlayStation Network servers were  caught unexpected and defenseless from the bot zombies – like a horrific scene from The Walking Dead.

Users who never opt to change the factory credentials that came with their home routers were the prime targets of the attack. If a user has login credentials with a username and password of admin/admin or even administrator/password, the chances are high that his/her router was compromised. Once a router was turned into a bot zombie, the router would go out crawling the internet in search for weak login accounts on other home routers – ensuring that they suffered the same fate.

Change your settings!

If you have not changed your login credentials to a different username and strong password – you should do that now. Each router device that is on the market has a factor username and password that can be easily found online for access recovery. Best is to change this right after setup to prevent it from being hacked.

Have a great (malware-free)day!