Two members of hacking groups Lizard Squad and PoodleCorp were charged last week with "conspiring to cause damage to protected computers," the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois said in a statement. Both hacking groups have taken credit for temporarily bringing down online gaming services including Xbox Live, PSN and Battle.net.
Zachary Buchta and Bradley van Rooy, both 19, have been arrested respectively in Maryland and the Netherlands. Lizard Squad and, since June, PoodleCorp are known for launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against online services "for the lulz". On top of that, they allegedly sold their DDoS services to others on the domain stresser.poodlecorp.org.
In addition to running cyber-attack-for-hire services, Buchta and van Rooy also allegedly "trafficked payment accounts that had been stolen from unsuspecting victims in Illinois and elsewhere," the statement reads. Thousands of people allegedly fell victim to that scheme.
Previously, Lizard Squad allegedly operated a "phone-bombing" service. According to a criminal complaint, the service "enabled paying customers to select victims to receive repeated harassing and threatening phone calls from spoofed phone numbers". In one instance, an Illinois-based victim received a spam call every hour for 30 days. The automated audio recording said, "better look over your [expletive] back because I don't flying [expletive] if we have to burn your [expletive] house down, if we have to [expletive] track your [expletive] family down, we will [expletive] your [expletive] up [expletive]."
On Twitter, both hacking groups bragged about their alleged exploits.
Blizzard (NA) #Offline #PoodleCorp — PoodleCorp (@PoodleCorp) September 18, 2016
League of Legends (NA) #Offline #Poodlecorp — PoodleCorp (@PoodleCorp) September 18, 2016
EU Blizzard #Offline - WoW #Offline, Diablo 3 #Offline, Starcraft 2 #Offline, Hearthstone #Offline @fbiarelosers @AppleJ4ckxoxo — Lizard Squad (@LizardLands) April 14, 2016
The maximum sentence for conspiring to launch cyber attacks is 10 years in prison.
