Hacker Gang 'Lizard Squad' Says It Has Stopped Attacking PlayStation Network And Xbox Live - And Will Never Do It Again

Tony Bowden

The notorious hacker collective "Lizard Squad" says it is no longer attacking PlayStation Network or Xbox Live and will not do so in the future.

You can thank Kim Dotcom for that, the group says on Twitter.

Kim Schmitz, a.k.a. Kim Dotcom, is the German founder of the defunct file-hosting service Megaupload, and the current founder of his new file-hosting service, Mega. He is also the founder and main funder of New Zealand's "Internet Party."

Despite what Lizard Squad says, however, as of Friday evening, PlayStation Network is still down, and Xbox Live is extremely limited.

On Thursday, after 24 hours of solid outages on Sony and Microsoft's game networks - believed to be DDoS attacks from Lizard Squad - Dotcom reached out to the hacker collective, offering lifetime premium subscriptions to his new encrypted filesharing service, Mega.

Following the initial offer, Lizard Squad stopped its attacks on PlayStation Network and Xbox Live - for about six hours. Then it started them up again on Friday morning.

But late Friday afternoon, the Lizard Squad says it has stopped throttling the game networks, citing Dotcom's earlier offer.

On Thursday, Lizard Squad said they initially wanted to take down PlayStation Network and Xbox Live "for the laughs," but eventually the collective found a cause to rally behind: forcing these companies to upgrade the security on their networks.

It's unclear how Dotcom's offer solves any of those issues, but perhaps the Lizard Squad members felt they got their point across, and settled to exit with their prizes: lifetime memberships to Dotcom's new privacy service.

The Finest Squad, the hacker group that's been busy keeping Lizard Squad at bay for the past 48+ hours, also confirms to Business Insider that Lizard Squad is "never attacking xbox or psn [sic] again."

Then again, it's tough to take Lizard Squad at its word, considering how this anonymous international group seems to enjoy putting a major damper on the holidays for a lot of people. But of course, Lizard Squad doesn't see it that way. 

We're continuing to reach out to Microsoft and Sony on this matter and we'll update this story as soon as we learn anything.