Tor users weren’t put at risk during the recent failed cyberattack

Lizard Squad, a hacker group, has been pretty busy over Christmas. First it knocked down PlayStation Network and Xbox Live, bringing online gaming on PlayStation and Xbox consoles to a standstill, and then set its sights on an anonymity network called Tor. Lizard Squad shifted its focus over the weekend, saying that it would “no longer attack” gaming services, and instead go after Tor with a zero-day exploit. 

Tor, the anonymity network, is recovering this weekend after it was targeted by hackers. The peer-to-peer network designed to keep users’ and their activities anonymous from state surveillance was the subject of an attack, said to be launched by the same hackers who brought down Sony’s PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox Live services over the Christmas holiday. In a statement on Friday, the Tor Project said the attack attempted to undermine the service by flooding it with fake servers. “The attackers have signed up many new relays in hopes of becoming a large fraction of the network,” the statement read. These new relay servers made up “less than 1 percent” of the Tor network’s capacity during the attack, it added.