Now infamous Internet mayhem crew Lizard Squad has just come out of an attention-grabbing holiday season with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against major gaming networks on Christmas Day to offer a DDoS service for hire. The service, billed as a stress tester, the “Lizard Stresser” was announced by the group on Twitter earlier today.

The product is marketed as a service that allows you to test your own network’s robustness by hitting it with a DDoS attack. Of course, the tool itself has absolutely no mechanisms to make sure that it hits your network and your network alone.

Our booter is now online & registration is open http://t.co/5JaolEGBUX

— R.I.U. Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) December 30, 2014

Looking at the Terms of Service on the Lizard Stresser it seems to try its best to distance the group from possible illegal use:

Permission is granted to stress test dedicated servers and networks owned by you. This is the oppurtunity [sic] to make your firewalls better, not to misuse against the law. This is a license given to you and anything you do while on http://lizardstresser.su/ is your own responsibility as we are not liable.

The provisions include a set of boilerplate limitations that look like a standard EULA for a multitude of services.

The release of this tool and subsequent methods to pay for DDoS attacks leads to easy speculation that Lizard Squad has been hitting various gaming networks and websites as part of a marketing campaign for this service.

As for payment options, Lizard Squad currently only takes Bitcoin; but has said on Twitter that a PayPal method is being worked on.

DDoS tools already prolific if you know where to look

DDoS tools has been in place and present for many years, if you know the right places to look. Attack tools such as the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (or LOIC) have been used in the past by hactivist groups and mayhem squads such as LulzSec and DerpTrolling, but for the most part these have been self-owned and operated networks.

The release of the Lizard Stresser publicly after gaining so much attention to Lizard Squad adds yet another tool for potential groups to use in order to disrupt the lives of others.

During 2014 and trending into 2015, DDoS is a major tool of disruption especially by mayhem crews and having easy access to one such as the Lizard Stresser may lead to an uptick in smaller DDoS attacks.

It is unknown how long the Lizard Squad tool will remain in operation, however, since having a payment front end and the ability to use it to attack specific networks may lead security researchers to more easily discover its origin points and capabilities.