What will happen to the Lizard Squad hackers?

From Kevin Mitnick to LulzSec and Anonymous, the destiny of a hacker group tends to follow the same arc - hack something, hack something bigger, until someone makes a mistake that leads to one or more members being arrested

When the UK police arrested an 18-year-old man over the online attack in December that knocked both the XBox Live and PlayStation Network offline, plenty of people raised knowing eyebrows. On Twitter, the chatter was that the person arrested was someone known as "Jordie", whose profile picture - and occasional tweets - suggests a black teenager from Rio de Janiero's favelas, rather than the resident of Southport that the arrest (and his other tweets) reveals him to be.

Among those who follow hacker culture, the arrest had only been a matter of time. Those observers see it as inevitable that Lizard Squad will follow what is now a standard narrative arc: burst to prominence, hack something, hack something bigger, until someone makes a mistake that leads to one or more members being arrested. Court cases will follow, the gang will break up, and the members will quietly fade from view with only their search history linking them to what happened.

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