On Thursday, the recent Lizard Squad tour of Internet infamy continued as the hacking group took credit for a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against the imageboard site 8chan. As of publication, 8chan.co is still inaccessible throughout the United States. Japanese sibling site 2ch.net, which also suffered an outage, was restored once 8chan's servers were "separated from the rest of the network," according to 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan's Twitter account.

In claiming credit for the attack, Lizard Squad pointed to its own recently launched service known as Lizard Stresser, which allows third parties to essentially hire Lizard Squad to DDoS the website of their choice. Users can pay anywhere from $6 to $500 to access the attack service, which then offers attack bursts that can last as long as 500 minutes concurrently.

Investigative reporter Brian Krebs recently profiled Lizard Squad in a story headlined Lizard Kids: A Long Trail of Fail. He said the group's Stresser service was lifted in its entirety from another more established DDoS-for-hire site. He also found Lizard Squad inadvertently exposed information about all 1,700 of its registered users.

In the meantime, no other hacking groups or individuals have come forward to take responsibility for this latest attack, and in 8chan's case, that could be one of many offended people. 8chan, like 4chan and other imageboard sites before it, allows users to anonymously post images and text, a fact that helped certain 4chan subchannels reach incredible levels of infamy over the years for their controversial content.

But even 4chan content was moderated in accordance with both laws and administrators' whims, and Brennan has said in interviews that he created 8chan in 2013 as a response to 4chan's changing policies—in short, if posts didn't break American law, they were fair game in his eyes.

“A regular dumb ICMP/SYN attack”

8chan gained a reputation for even more extreme content as a result, in addition to becoming a meeting ground for early proponents of the #GamerGate hashtag who had been kicked off of 4chan. When 8chan tried using Patreon to raise money this past December, the crowdfunding site responded by calling out 8chan users' content that promoted "self-harm," "pedophilia," and "illustrated child exploitation imagery"—and Patreon's statement didn't even refer to recent waves of "doxxing" on the site (publishing people's personal information for the sake of pranks and worse).

In a public statement posted late Wednesday, Brennan said "no one knows" who perpetrated the attack, "and there is no way to know."

"It took LizardSquad attacking Microsoft and Sony for any of them to be arrested," Brennan added. "Obviously, someone DDoSing a small community like 8chan.co is very low on the priority list for law enforcement."

He insisted that users not believe rumors spreading on Twitter about who might have been responsible.

Brennan told Ars the attack was "a regular dumb ICMP/SYN attack," and he linked to a downtime graph for 8chan's major server. Though 8chan employed Cloudflare anti-DDoS protection, he said that such protection amounted to squat once the attackers learned the 8chan server's real IP address.

Brennan's public statement insisted that administrators were aiming to restore the site within "12 hours," though he admitted he may have to purchase separate server space as a temporary stopgap that could last as long as two weeks.