Sony Online Entertainment's former CEO just declared war on the Lizard Squad hackers

The Sony PlayStation Network (PSN) and Microsoft Xbox Live Christmas service outage last year left many people red faced and angry, but few have taken it to the level of Daybreak, formerly known as Sony Online Entertainment, CEO John Smedley.

Late last night Smedley spewed a torrent of hate against 17-year-old Julius "zeekill" Kivimaki on Twitter mere moments after the youth, who describes himself online as an "untouchable hacker God," was convicted of 50,700 computer crimes charges.

The offences related to Kivimaki's participation in the Lizard Squad hacking gang's "operations" and will see him serve a two-year suspended prison sentence.

Kivimaki is believed to have taken part in a high profile cyber attack on PSN and Xbox live in December 2014. The incident saw the Lizard Squad target the gaming networks with a special type of attack, known as distributed denial of service (DDoS).

DDoS attacks don't actually hack services, or steal data from their victims, but are instead designed to knock online services offline. They work by overloading the back end servers running the services with requests - the equivalent of spamming them to death.

The December incident left thousands of people unable to play Xbox and PlayStation games on Christmas Eve and Christmas day.

Smedley's vendetta against the group and Kivimaki is more personal, as he believes the youth is responsible for a bogus bomb threat that landed a plain he was on in August 2014.

In the tweets targeting Kivimaki, who goes by the Twitter handle @what_security, Smedley made a series of threats, claiming he is "coming for" him and is considering mounting litigation against the ex-Lizard Squad hacker's parents. You can see the full series of tweets below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kivimaki isn't the only Lizard squad hacker to come into Smedley's firing line. He also targeted ex-Lizard Squad hacker Vinnie Omari, tweeting him an ominous message warning "he'll get his day in court too."

Lizard Squad is one of many hacker groups to go after Sony. Sony suffered a more serious cyber attack in November 2014 that saw hackers, believed to be from North Korea, post vast amounts of the firm's data, including internal emails and intellectual property, online.