Lizard Squad claims to have brought down both Facebook and Instagram

Both social network platforms Facebook and Instagram went down on Tuesday while Lizard Squad hacking team claims responsibility for an alleged DDoS attack.

A couple of the most popular social networks Facebook and Instagram went down for at least 40 minutes on Tuesday, the official motivation is a technical outage, but the popular hacking crew Lizard Squad claims to have attacked the giants. The incident impacted also the mobile applications of Facebook and Instagram, which were not reachable for the same time.

“Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can,” said a message on the Facebook site.

The company also published the following statement on the incident:

“Facebook and Instagram experienced a major outage tonight from 22:10 until 23:10 PST. Our engineers identified the cause of the outage and recovered the site quickly. You should now see decreasing error rates while our systems stabilize. We don’t expect any other break in service. I’ll post another update within 30 mins. Thank you for your patience.”

Waiting for further information on the incident, experts speculate that the attack is in Lizard Squad style, the group demonstrated to have the capabilities to hit and run the giants, Sony and Microsoft know the power of the team.

This group is demonstrating the ability to hit with DDoS attacks practically every adversary. Despite the recent arrests the team is continuing to operate, recently the hackers hit the website of Malaysia Airlines, also revealing a disconcerting link with IS.

Obviously the news became viral, hundreds of millions of users have gone into panic, it is proof of the high number of threads and post appeared on the network.

“The hashtag #facebookdown has recently appeared on Twitter. The hashtag already tops Worldwide Trends on Twitter. The websites of the Tinder matchmaking mobile app and Hipchat instant messaging are also down.” reported RT.com. “The hashtag #ThingsIDidWhenFacebookWasDown has also become popular on social media.”

Despite there are no official news regarding the event, on the Internet is circulating the image of Norse – IPViking Live attack map that displays a DDoS attack against servers in the US.

The unique certainty is the media coverage of the incident. The total number of users belonging to the platforms involved far exceeds one billion. In September 2014, Facebook has about 1.35 billion monthly active subscribers while Instagram counts on more than 150 million monthly active users.

UPDATE Jan 27

“Contrary to suggestions hacker group Lizard Squad took out Facebook, there was almost certainly no attack on the social network and its photo sharing property Instagram, which both went down late last night. According to a source with knowledge of the matter, the downtime was the result of a technical foul up. Facebook is now confirming this in statements to media.” reports Forbes.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Lizard Squad, Facebook, Instagram)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.