Alex Krasodomski

Are the members of hacker group Lizard Squad cyberterrorists or cybervandals?

Another day, another hack. This morning, Facebook and Instagram went dark. Facebook has blamed a technical glitch; ‘Lizard Squad’ celebrated another successful attack:

Yesterday, the group claimed responsibility for defacing the website of Malaysia Airlines. One of the more active of many mysterious groups, they have claimed responsibility for a range of online mischief in the last year, from hacking into online games networks to the temporary internet blackout in North Korea in December 2014 (although the latter isn’t easy to prove). This kind of seemingly random hacking has been happening more often, and has been termed ‘cybervandalism’. A good example was the hacking of US military Central Command’s Twitter account earlier this year.

What exactly hacking is, generally speaking, is poorly understood. It is perceived as an immensely difficult thing to do, and conjures images of hunched backs, dark rooms and lots of computer screens like the Nebuchadnezzar in The Matrix. In fact, a lot of hacking is quite simple. That ‘123456’ has been in a running battle with ‘password’ as the internet’s favourite password since its inception is testament to this.  An XKCD cartoon echoes this message.

In the wake of a hack, comments are drawn from security and counter-terrorist consultancies and the story is splattered across major news channels. But is there any more to this than the antics of an attention-seeking ‘group of kids’? The files apparently taken during the CENTCOM raid were quickly dismissed as fake. Malaysia Airlines were quick to explain that the hackers hadn’t accessed customer data, and interviews with hackers claiming to be from Lizard Squad stress how enjoyable hacking is, rather than necessarily the damage they want to cause. It is a game or challenge that is fun in itself: replacing an airline’s website with a lizard in a stovepipe hat is just a marker of success, like a climber sticking a flag on top of a mountain.

But things aren’t always quite that simple; and here the official line and the hackers’ line differ.

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