LulzSec’s Titanic Takeover Tuesday Takes Down Gaming Communites

Alliteration aside, Tuesday, June 14, proved to be a productive day for the hacktivist group of the moment, LulzSec. Granted, productive is a relative term here, but whatever your views are towards the mischievous hacker community, the group did get a great deal accomplished when it took down a number of video game-friendly sites and services.

After posting a phone number on their Twitter feed, the group took hack requests from callers with posted number acting as a request line. Yes, you read that correctly — LulzSec was taking hacking requests, and according to one of their most recent tweets, the group is getting a great deal of responses and requests from their multitude of Twitter fans.

And, boy, did that open a flood gate of requests — mainly from the video gaming community, apparently. Needless to say, the results were impressive. Even if it’s a begrudging angle of congratulations, the overall success of the LulzSec attack cannot be denied or ignored. It’s also apparent that Yahtzee Crowshaw’s reviews upset some gamers who follow LulzSec, because one of their first targets was the The Escapist, a video game site where Crowshaw’s brutally honest reviews are featured. Naturally, LulzSec documented their progress and reveled in their mischief:

After The Escapist, LulzSec’s next honored request turned their sites on EVE Online, a space-based MMORPG with a subscription base of over 300,000 members. Using a dedicated denial of service attack (DDoS), LulzSec was successful in disrupting EVE Online’s operations.

Ars Technica has further details of LulzSec’s busy day:

The third target—and the only one for which the group has offered a rationale beyond “lulz”—is an IT security company named Finfisher. Their site was taken down, briefly, because “apparently they sell monitoring software to the government or some shit like that.”

Gamers were once more in the crosshairs with the fourth target; more login servers, this time for Minecraft. Just as with EVE Online, going after the login servers also took out the game’s website.

As way of giving credit where it’s due, it should be noted LulzSec’s Titanic Takeover Tuesday came on the heels of what the group calls personal attacks — yes, the group differentiates between the request line inspired DDoS attacks and groups they actively target — that US Senate and Bethesda Studios, a video game company responsible for the Fallout series, get hacked by the group, who gleefully posted their results at their site.

One of LulzSec’s many Twitter fans summed their efforts up quite effectively:

No doubt that last “evade any consequences” part stings badly for the victims of LulzSec’s shenanigans. The boasting and hiding in plain site only makes it sting that much more. It should be noted that while Tuesday’s events had their own, nifty, alteration-filled title, the group hasn’t stopped carrying out phone requests, something their Twitter feed demonstrates very well. It should also be noted that the technique has changed. Instead of relying on computer-based DDoS attacks, the group is simply forwarding calls to their hotline — of which there are many — to various switchboards around the world.

And, of course, they are posting the results for all to see:

Any thoughts on where you’d send a LulzSec attack if they asked you for a target? Let us know in the comments.