Lulz Security says it hacked News Corporation sites

Hacking group Lulz Security claimed responsibility for a string of attacks on web sites belonging to the News Corporation on Monday. Among the attacks, the hacking group planted a fake article about the death of Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of the News Corporation, on one of the company’s newspaper sites.

The fake article appeared on a page at new-times.co.uk, which had apparently been used to inform readers about a new design for the site of The Times. It said Murdoch had died from a drug overdose. Murdoch’s company is facing a sweeping scandal in Britain, set off by revelations that journalists at his newspapers hacked into voice-mail accounts in search of news.

After posting the fake article, LulzSec apparently altered the web site of The Sun, another Murdoch paper, so that it sent site visitors to the article. Soon after, The Sun site instead forwarded visitors to the LulzSec Twitter page.

LulzSec also claimed it had changed the DNS addresses for all of News International’s web sites, making these completely inaccessible to the public. DNS refers to the Domain Name System, a directory that connects web site names to numerical internet addresses.

When News International, the British newspaper division of the News Corporation, posted what appeared to be a statement about the hacking of The Sun’s site on its corporate site, those who tried to read the statement were also sent to the Twitter page. The sites of News International, The Sun and The Times were all unreachable later in the evening.

LulzSec last month said it was shutting shop and would discontinue a hacking spree, but the group seems to have reorganised and is now active again.

The group has claimed responsibility for hacking a number of sites over the last two months, including those of PBS, the United States Senate, the Arizona Department of Public Safety and the web site of a company associated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

As the hacking was unfolding online, LulzSec said on its Twitter feed that it had gained access to News Corporation networks and taken internal e-mail. It said it planned to release more information in the coming days.

Members of Anonymous, another hacking group intertwined with Lulz Security, also chimed in and began posting Twitter messages with mobile phone numbers and e-mail passwords that it said belonged to editors at News of the World, the now-closed newspaper at the center of the hacking scandal.

Former employees of News of the World received an e-mail late Monday in response to the attacks, warning them to change their e-mail passwords. Company representatives were not immediately available for comment.

The e-mail for a member of The Times had been hacked, the staff member said, rendering it completely nonfunctional on Monday evening.

©2011 The New York
Times News Service