After becoming infamous on the Internet for the Christmas Day siege of Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, which knocked the services offline, Lizard Squad quickly launched a DDoS-for-hire Lizard Stresser. The Internet mayhem group used their newfound notoriety to market this service, and now the group is teasing a new site that will hawk illegal goods similar to the now defunct Silk Road.

The new website, built atop the foundation of the Lizard Stresser, brands itself SHENRON—a name taken from the anime Dragon Ball Z referring to the dragon cited in the title, an image of the dragon from the cartoon even appears in the logo. This branding seems to follow the almost-clever juvenile character of Lizard Squad’s public presence.

The Shenron website sells itself as “THE ONLY UNDERGROUND MARKET THAT WORKS ON YOUR IPAD.”

However, once logged in very little functionality appears to have been added to support any sort of Silk Road-like black market. The underlying UI of the Lizard Stresser still persists with a segment for purchasing DDoS packages with bitcoins, a local wallet that can be filled with money, and a graph showing the current status of the tool.

No services for buying or selling illicit goods have appeared to date. The original Silk Road–now defunct after the arrest and conviction of Ross Ulbricht accused of being the Dread Pirate Roberts or admin of the website–traded in illegal drugs, fake passports, and other criminal services.

The whimsical rise of the Lizard Squad as celebrity cybercriminals

In previous years, Internet mayhem crews seemed to stick to processing leaks from hacks and delivering crushing DDoS attacks, such as seen with LulzSec and DerpTrolling. However, Lizard Squad has slowly been turning their criminal notoriety into market share.

By using the Christmas Day siege and continued attacks against gaming services, Lizard Squad’s activities continue to keep them in the news and, with careful teases of services such as the Lizard Stresser, the crew appears to be building small criminal fiefdom of digital services.

The Lizard Squad’s activities have not been without consequences. U.K. authorities and the FBI have been tracking and arresting various individuals who are alleged to be connected to the group including Vinnie Omari, a 22-year-old British citizen, and an unidentified 18-year-old teen from the U.K. arrested also by authorities in January.

The mayhem group has also been in various “cyberwars” with cells of the hacktivist collective Anonymous over the attacks against gaming websites that culminated a hack and leak of the Lizard Stresser’s customer database and plain text passwords. The group has also stoked the flames of a continuing feud with security reporter Brain Krebs, who gives as good as he gets (and his website has been DDoSed repeatedly by the mayhem crew.)

The evolution of Lizard Squad from a garden-variety of DDoS mayhem crew into a minor group of would-be criminal masterminds has been slow in development but the actual launch of the Shenron black market could change that.

Image credit: Overeat – Gameover via photopin (license); and Lizard Squad Twitter avatar.