Lizard Squad Knocks National Crime Agency Offline with DDoS Attack Amid Arrests

After nearly four months of inactivity the infamous band of hackers, Lizard Squad is back, knocking a national law enforcement website offline after half a dozen customers to their DDoS tool were arrested.

The United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency (NCA) website was offline earlier today after Lizard Squad sent a large Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack, knocking the service offline. The team of hackers executed the attack in response to the six teens the NCA arrested last week for using Lizard Stresser, a DDoS-for-Hire tool built by Lizard Squad. The service allowed anyone to pay for a subscription and knock any slew of websites offline with the high-powered tool.

The NCA even warned customers who purchased Lizard Stresser last week that they were to be under investigation soon:

Ever used a #DDoS tool? If you’re registered to #LizardStresser officers may be visiting you soon! pic.twitter.com/JDrbbJoIEd

— NationalCrimeAgency (@NCA_UK) August 28, 2015

The squad of hackers were presumably angry at the law enforcement agency’s arrest of their teen clients and the tweet the NCA sent above, mentioning their DDoS tool. In retaliation, Lizard Squad swiftly knocked the NCA website offline with a massive distributed denial of service attack, tweeting their accomplishment:

Stressed out? http://t.co/5631pELDMR #offline pic.twitter.com/hxhAuSdoqq

— Lizard Squad (@LizardLands) September 1, 2015

While the National Crime Agency confirmed the attack made their website inaccessible for hours they noted that no “hack” occurred, and that all NCA data was safe. Aside from confirmed the attack, the NCA did not care to comment on specifics of the attack and a spokesperson told Forbes “the NCA website is an attractive target. Attacks on it are a fact of life.”

In a statement to Sky news, the NCA said the attack was a “temporary inconvenience to users of our website” and that the attack had no effect on their “operational capacity.” The NCA statement continued:

“We have a duty to balance the value of keeping our website accessible with the cost of doing so, especially in the face of a threat which can scale up endlessly.

“The measures we have in place at present mean that our site is generally up and running again within 30 minutes, though occasionally it can take longer.

“We think that’s proportionate.”

At the time of writing this article, the official NCA website www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk has been resorted and is fully functional.

[Photo via National Crime Agency/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) Changes: Image Cropped]