News Intl offline after LulzSec siege
News sites managed under Rupert Murdoch's News International banner have been taken offline after malicious attacks by revived hacktivist group LulzSec, with the hackers also posting contact details of the editorial team on Twitter.
(Credit: PBSOwned image by Matt Joyce, CC2.0)
This morning, LulzSec decided to give News International a taste of its own medicine, hacking the sites of The Sun and The Times, to redirect to a fake story reporting the death of media mogul Murdoch.
News International has appeared to have taken all of its sites offline due to the onslaught.
LulzSec tweeted this morning, "News International's DNS servers (link web addresses to servers) and all 1024 web addresses are down." A subsequent DNS lookup on the sites of The Sun, The Times and News International show that the sites are unreachable.Lulzsec's recently acquired partner Anonymous tweeted: "So Morlock put his servers offline. Welcome to the club Rupert."
Both hacktivist parties even began posting the mobile phone numbers of senior News International executives as the hacks continued.
Pete Picton - 788050730 | Chris Hampartsoumian - 07799767555 | Harvey Shaw - 07770380556 <- Call="" them="" (mobile)!<="" p="">LulzSec retweets a follower who posts the contact details of The Sun's editorial team and web development contractor.
The attack has brought the group out of retirement. It had previously stated that it was hanging up the monocle after 50 days of hacks.
Its latest crusade against Rupert Murdoch's news empire has been spurred by the voicemail-cracking scandal that engulfed The News of the World. The popular British Sunday paper was forced to close its doors when it was caught accessing private voicemail accounts, with the scandal even forcing two of Britain's top cops to resign in its wake.
More on this story as it develops.