LulzSec comes back to hack The Sun web site

The fake news story created by LulzSec

After having stated at the end of June its intention to disband, the hacker group LulzSec has claimed responsibility for hacking the web site of The Sun newspaper, owned by News International. Visitors to the site late on 18 July were redirected to a fake page carrying a news story stating that Rupert Murdoch's body had been discovered after he had apparently committed suicide.

According to a report in The Guardian newspaper, the hackers managed to change the code on The Sun site for the breaking news banner so that a banner refresh took the reader to the fake page, at new-times.co.uk/sun. This site is hosted on a "retired" News International server and is mainly used for minor stories. After News International became aware of the hack, and tried to regain control, the hackers then redirected The Sun's homepage to the LulzSec Twitter account, where the address of new-times.co.uk/sun was given, together with the claim that this was only the beginning. The Sun web site was quickly taken offline for a few hours, as was that of The Times, as a precautionary measure.

The Guardian report states that having found a weakness in the old server, the hackers had extensive control over the server and thereby gained access to "large parts of the News International network, possibly including the archived emails". In other tweets, LulzSec and others from Anonymous have published what are claimed to be the login email details and phone numbers of various highly-placed individuals associated with News International and the recent phone "hacking" scandal, most notably former News of the World Editor and former CEO of News International Rebekah Brooks. This suggests that the hackers have gained access to the News International email archive and may well release some of the contents.

See also:

• Ex-Prime Minister accuses News International of using spyware, a report from The H.

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