Swatting Mumsnet
While the Lizard Squad almost certainly consists of just a handful of people, it's possible that the recent attack against Mumsnet was the work of a single person with a grudge, and its misogynistic nature suggests a personal, rather than a political or financial, motive.
In this case, DDoS was just part of a campaign that included account hijacking, redirection of the Mumsnet home page to the attacker's Twitter page, the compromise of around 3,000 user records, and the ‘swatting’ of site founder Justine Roberts and another Mumsnet user.
“Swatting is where a false report of an active threat at a victim's address is made to the police, to provoke an active armed response,” explains Kevin Epstein, VP advanced security and governance at Proofpoint. ”This is traumatic at best, potentially dangerous at worst to the victim, who the police must recognise as distinct from a potential target. Swatting is a crossover point between cyber- and real-world threat; to ‘swat’ someone, an attacker must have details of the victim's physical address and life – and in this case it appears such may have been taken from internal records.”
The DDoS attack itself was not especially significant, lasting from the evening of 11 August to the following morning – again suggesting either a lone attacker or, at best, a small group without access to major resources such as a botnet.
“According to news reports the attack peaked at 17,000 requests per second,” says Igal Zeifman, senior digital strategist at Imperva. “While significant, compared to the regular amount of traffic, this is still considered a mid-sized application layer DDoS attack that could have been easily mitigated with adequate DDoS protection. To put this in context, the largest application layer attack we saw last quarter peaked at over 179,000 requests per second, with even a single hijacked computer able to spew out several thousand requests a second.”