Over the past week, the online gaming services that support Microsoft’s Xbox consoles and Sony’s PlayStation consoles have faced service disruptions thought to be caused by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The hacker group Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility in multiple cases as gaming services work to mitigate the damage.

In the midst of attacks against these gaming services, Lizard Squad has also issued a Twitter notice threatening to cripple Xbox Live services over the Christmas holiday. This message came before the current week-long series of disruptions to both Xbox Live and PlayStation Network.

First, on Monday, December 1 Xbox Live suffered an hour-long outage that affected customers’ ability to connect to the service. Players attempting to sign into the service were met with error 80151909, a status displayed when Xbox Live is unable to download a player’s profile. This event was reported widely at video game enthusiast press sites such as Polygon.

Next, on Friday, December 5 the Xbox Live network suffered yet another disruption, which triggered a status change for “core services” to limited. This event was also reported by Polygon and Lizard Squad took credit.

Saturday, December 7, PlayStation Network suffered a similar outage and Lizard Squad took credit for that as well.

Most recently, last night Xbox Live once again suffered a disruption that has limited core services. No news yet if Lizard Squad has claimed credit for that as well.

The use of DDoS a strong trend since LulzSec

Using DDoS to attract attention has been a mainstay of Internet hacker groups to create mayhem and make names for themselves. In 2012, LulzSec released leaked confidential information from numerous sources (including the CIA and various sheriff’s offices) to garner attention but also hit gaming and police websites with DDoS attacks.

New Year’s Eve 2014, hacker group DerpTrolling hit numerous gaming services from Riot Games’ League of Legends to Blizzard Entertainment’s Battle.net that runs logins for World of Warcraft and Diablo 3.

According to the Black Lotus 2014 Q3 report on DDoS attacks the total volume and number of DDOS attacks may be falling but attackers have been getting smarter about the exploits they use. Although groups such as DerpTrolling, Lizard Squad, and further back LulzSec, have popularized DDoS attacks now mythologized in mass media reporting, they represent a smaller number of attacks that are more carefully coordinated.

Black Lotus reports that the company mitigated over 940,789 DDoS attacks in 2014 and 201,721 of them occurred in Q3. As a tool, DDoS may be on the decline, but it is still extremely prevalent.

Groups such as Lizard Squad appear to seek the limelight by targeting consumer-facing services of extremely popular games or may be simply taking credit for outages they see happen. Noting the thread to take “Xbox Live down forever” during the Christmas holiday, Lizard Squad may be the hacker group to keep an eye on.