Not so LOL: Lulzsec hacks the Sun King

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 19 July 2011 11:16

Your IT - Home IT

Rupert Murdoch's woes continue as his UK newspaper, The Sun, is hacked by Lulzsec with a fake story falsely claiming Rupert Murdoch passed away overnight at the age of 80 through the intake of 'palladium'.

Bunkum, not palladium, has seen notorious hacker collective 'Lulzsec' reform after previously claiming to have disbanded, with Rupert Murdoch's UK newspapers in their sights.

After hacking into Murdoch's 'The Sun' newspaper overnight, Lulzsec posted a story claiming Rupert Murdoch had died overnight, with fanciful claims of 'palladium ingestion', alongside grammatical and spelling errors that a professional newspaper should not make.

Once The Sun's web admins figured out what was going on, the story was taken down, with Lulzsec then redirecting The Sun's traffic to Lulzsec's Twitter feed.

However it then transpired that News International's web admins decided to take down all of its newspaper sites in an attempt to stop the hackers from causing even more mischief.

The ABC quotes LulzSec's twitter page, where Lulzsec members note that 'TheSun.co.uk now redirects to our twitter feed. Hello, everyone that wanted to visit The Sun! How is your day? Good? Good!".

There's also claims by Lulzsec members that: 'We are battling with The Sun admins right now - I think they are losing'.

Lulzsec promise that this latest hack attack is 'just the beginning', again vindicating numerous predictions at the end of 2010 that this year, 2011, would be the year of malware and hack attacks.

News reports have also noted that the false news of Rupert Murdoch's death comes at the same time that news of a genuine death has occurred.

Former News of the Word reporter, Sean Hoare, who was also a whistleblower exposing the phone hacking scandal, has been found dead in a death that has not been considered 'suspicious', but merely 'unexplained' - at least for now.

While the circumstances hardly hold any lulz for many concerned, Lulzsec is back, with the promise of more hacktivisim to come.