Kim Dotcom manages to ‘save Christmas for gamers’ by bribing hackers

Gamers frustrated with the Christmas DDoS attack on X-box and PlayStation networks may have to thank fugitive filesharing mogul Kim Dotcom for the service being back online. At least, that’s what their Twitter exchange implies.

I bet he made a lot of people happy. I doubt that his motives for stopping the attacks were completely altruistic, however. The article said that he is an avid gamer.

Source

a reply to: Skid Mark

First thought that I had was: He will now have the IP of 3,000 computers that were given these vouchers.. likely people related to lizard squad. As an avid gamer he might just attack them out of principal.

a reply to: doompornjunkie

I hadn't thought of that. It's a possibility. He might also try to track them to make sure they live up to their end of the bargain.

a reply to: Skid Mark

True, or as a programmer he could also have a trojan be downloaded to those computers when they download a movie to create his own botnet! That's what I would do..

a reply to: doompornjunkie

Not how that works.

the trojan would have had to have been dispersed already at the point of the bribe?

ok the Hackers should be ashamed of them selfs for doing this at Christmas Time
2nd why ho why do I hear the words my Christmas is ruined because of it sounds like the ones that say that live on line and never get off the playstation I had a playstation years ago and I never needed to get on line to play a game
what happened with the whole family going out instead of kids upstairs on xbox

After reading the article I can most probably conclude that Kim Dotcom was in on that attack, and this was all scripted, just to prove as he says in the last tweet displayed in the article, that 'diplomacy works, try it' (paraphrased).

originally posted by: ImaFungi
What random group of hackers would have the power to take both the entire xbox and playstation network offline, and why would they do it on christmas, did they figure they could gain something like they are supposedly gaining from this Kim guy?

Lizard has been a collection of petulant TW@T$ as of late towards both services. Why? Because they can. Their "attacks" are largely service interruption (not true hacks like Sony had over The Interview) and they always claim something chapped their cheeks, like their ham and cheese hot pockets got cold too fast.

Derek

a reply to: ImaFungi

They are trolls with a large botnet. Not the first group of it's kind, nor will it be the last. Bored adolescents and young adults seeking attention, only thing is, it may not be in their favor to draw this much attention, these types of groups tend to implode once they hit the spotlight.

a reply to: Viesczy

They have also attacked Blizzard/Activision servers (world of warcraft) and Valve/Steam servers (Counterstrike, Team Fortress 2, etc) as of late (I had a Counterstrike match go haywire with lag one evening a few weeks back, they were bragging all over twitter about it, only the servers were stabilized and everything was back to normal in less then an hour).

I don't buy it. I was playing Black Op's 2 all day yesterday and never even got disconnected from XBL. I think Mr. Megavideo is just pulling a Steve Jobs and taking credit for something he didn't do.

It's also worth it to point out that PSN is still down. Guess his cheque bounced....

The entire case surrounding this man kind of annoyed me. It was made to look as if he was singlehandedly killing entertainment moguls, and he became wanted in the US for as much. I will never feel sorry for entertainment companies, whose profits are still quite great. Part of this stems from the fact that as a society we overpay actors and other entertainers, while the occupations that truly matter are rewarded with salaries that are barely enough to live on. Anyway, he is right in saying that diplomacy works.

With that said however, part of the problem with negotiating with criminals is that others will see that the criminals were successful, and this will encourage them to take similar actions. If you know that you can do something and get away with it, you will be much more inclined to do that thing, or many people will. Criminals especially. This is why the US was so against negotiating with terrorists in my opinion. On a similar note I have always found it amusing that the police will negotiate with criminals in tense situations, but the criminals do not realize that the police are not actually negotiating. They are trying to make the criminals think they are negotiating, but nothing will be honored. The criminals in question know that their vouchers will be honored, simply because they can easily restart the attacks if these vouchers were canceled.

And then there is the fact that diplomacy and negotiating with criminals are not actually the same thing. Saying that the US could learn something about diplomacy might only be half true. The US should not take a note when it comes to negotiating with criminals, because this will work out worse in the end. But they should take note when it comes to negotiating with non-criminals as well as other nations.

a reply to: tomcat415

Get over it. It's like when you were a kid if you got a new train set or something and it was stolen from under your Christmas tree by burglars. It would make your Christmas less enjoyable, and your parents would be out the money they spent.

It's not like kids want to be online with their game 24/7 (well not all kids) they just want to be able to enjoy their Christmas presents like any other kid.

diplomacy works, try it

Diplomacy does occasionally work, unfortunately what this guy did was pure bribery with a bit of self promotion thrown in.
I cant help but feel in this instance the terrorists have won

His motives were to advertise his company Mega, and he's not going to track them with the vouchers. Lizard Squad isn't even going to use the vouchers, they're going to sell them and probably use the money to rent more bot-nets and continue their DDOS attacks. He basically just gave them a bunch of money.

vouchers that could quickly be sold on an underground black market. The hackers claim the vouchers are worth $300,000.

Omari told the Daily Dot his group has already sold 300 of the 3,000 vouchers they received from Kim Dotcom at $50 a pop. While we were unable to independently verify claims of the voucher sales, those numbers would mean that the group raked in $15,000 in the hours after the attack ended.

www.dailydot.com...

What a dumb a**. So they get the vouchers and restart the the attack. Who didn't see that coming, other then Mr Dumbcom

What a damn joke this article is.

That's it, I don't know how else to put it except maybe HUGE HOAX

The wording of the verbal/written exchange, was far too soft.

It's either a trap, or he's a true fool and just rewarded the trolls with a big wheel of cheese.

They will want more cheese. This raises more questions.

I'd like to think there's a plan in this to entrap these lizzard's whilst they are lying in the sun, but all i can see is Ego feeding Ego some cookies.

One can only hope.. at the end of the day, that Developers and publishers get some flack over this outage. The main problem in all this is many games & gaming units are not shipped *complete* and require an online service to function to their full capacity, some games like AC:Unity are broken & unplayable until updated.. this is a industry trend that's getting worse. They also need to understand we all don't have *unlimited* internet quotas... but that's another story..

The main reason for unfinished/crippled games on release was explained by Ubisoft shortly after AC:U was out.
Sony and MS, have strict locks on their OS behind the gaming platforms, games need to be sent to either company, Authorized, then sent back to the devs.. it cannot be done "in house" and it takes a while so it's often not done until the last few weeks of the final dev cycle.

What this means is if there's a major confliction of code on the system OS the dev's find out (if at all) a few days before the game ships.. It's kinda all screwed up if you ask me.. logic dictates the devs should have access to the Authorization process early on.. during alpha, but these codes are "company secrets" and those secrets are causing alot of hurt feelings on many sides of the gaming industry.

Had the lizzards a brain in that collective head of theirs.... they would have made this their motive/message.. as that's what the attack higlighted more than anything else (reliance on internet for functionality/3gig day one patches for a playable game)
but no.. they wanted "vouchers"........

they're trending today but probably wont do much beyond x-box and online gaming