Lizard Squad attacks Tor network, ignoring warning from Anonymous

Lizard Squad, the group believed to be behind the Christmas DDoS attacks on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network now has a new target -- Tor. Just a week ago, the leader of the Tor Project, Roger Dingledine, warned that the anonymizing network could come under attack, and now it seems as though his prediction was correct.

War has already been declared on Lizard Squad by Anonymous, but this does not seem to have been enough to deter the group from its attacks. Reports suggest that more than 3,000 Tor relays have been compromised, and there are fears that this could impact the anonymity Tor was designed to offer.

Yesterday, Lizard Squad announced that it was no longer targeting Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network. It's not clear whether this decision came as a result of Kim Dotcom's intervention but by switching its focus to Tor, the group is certainly trying to draw attention to itself:

While there have been claims that Lizard Squad is incapable of taking on Tor, it seems that there have been successful attacks. Security researcher Nadim Kobeissi tweeted a screenshot that shows a large number of relays named LizardNSA:

The Tor Project released a statement which seems to suggest that things are under control:

This looks like a regular attempt at a Sybil attack: the attackers have signed up many new relays in hopes of becoming a large fraction of the network. But even though they are running thousands of new relays, their relays currently make up less than 1% of the Tor network by capacity. We are working now to remove these relays from the network before they become a threat, and we don't expect any anonymity or performance effects based on what we've seen so far.

There's something of a war of words underway at the moment as well. Despite the fact that many of the members of Lizard Squad, and the associated Finest Squad, have been doxed (had their personal details published online), the Lizard Squad Twitter feed remains defiant:

from ffffff http://feeds.betanews.com/~r/bn/~3/8jjyzV9-Qm8/

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