The FBI is reported to be investigating the people responsible for the denial of service attacks that rendered Microsoft's Xbox Live and Sony's PlayStation Network inaccessible for much of Christmas Day, according to sources speaking to the Daily Dot.

A group calling itself Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility for the Christmas attacks. The group has raised its profile over the Christmas period by speaking with a variety of media outlets, including BBC Radio 5 Live and Sky News. Talking to WinBeta, group members said that the denial of service attacks were being done to demonstrate poor security on the part of Microsoft and Sony.

The Lizard Squad members call themselves "Ryan Cleary" (after Ryan "ViraL" Cleary, the LulzSec collaborator imprisoned for hacking and possession of child pornography) and "Vinnie Omari." They claim that their denial of service attacks used undersea routers and that a total of 1.2 terabits per second of data flooded the gaming networks.

"Ryan" is reported to be 16 or 17 years old and living in Finland. He claims that this gives him protection against US law enforcement agencies due to Finnish law providing protection against extradition.

Those Christmas attacks were apparently stopped after Kim Dotcom offered the group vouchers for 500GB for one year on his Mega encrypted storage service, valued at $99 each. Dotcom told the Lizards that the vouchers would be converted to lifetime ones, provided that the group continued to refrain from attacking the services. Dotcom gave the group 3,000 of the vouchers, and they claim they are being sold for $50 each.

Microsoft and Sony have said little about the attacks, though Sony has acknowledged that there was an attack. Both networks now appear to be working fine.

With the games' networks off-limits, the group now claims that it is attacking the Tor network instead.

It's not immediately clear, however, if the current Lizard Squad members are the same Lizard Squad that conducted a string of similar denial of service attacks on gaming servers over the past few months. A competing group calling itself The Finest claimed to have doxxed Lizard Squad's members in mid December, and a number of Twitter accounts claimed to belong to Lizard Squad members went silent at around the same time, and some Lizard Squad Twitter accounts were suspended.

However, "Ryan" and "Vinnie" have laughed off The Finest's claims and say that the information in the doxxing was either "extremely outdated or straight-up wrong."