A cyber hack event has resulted in The Sun newspaper’s website being breached and the URL redirecting to a false story covering the death of the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, being posted up.
Since the Sun breach occurred, hacking organisation LulzSec has said it was responsible. While the link was intact, online users trying to access the newspaper’s website, sun.co.uk, in the usual way, were instead redirected to a site named new-times.co.uk, where a piece titled ‘Media Mogul’s Body Discovered’ had been posted up.
The story intimated that a “large quantity of [rare metal] palladium” had been ingested by Murdoch. This, it said, led to his death, which saw him “...stumbling into his famous topiary garden late last night, passing out in the early hours of the morning.”
This site went down after a while but, thereafter, another URL temporarily replaced The Sun’s address, this time linking out to LulzSec’s Twitter page.
The newspaper is part of News International’s portfolio and, in a statement, the parent firm confirmed, via a representative, knowledge of the Sun cyber hack events, but declined to comment further.
The Sun’s official website subsequently seemed to be inaccessible for a while but, as of mid-morning on the 19 July, appeared to be working as per normal.
LulzSec – short for Lulz Security – was established in May of this year and, since then, has taken credit for a number of significant security breaches.
The LulzSec Sun hack coincided with recent revelations concerning the behaviour of employees working for another News International publication, the News of the World. As a result of the phone-hacking that’s claimed to have taken place, the News of the World now no longer exists.
Commenting on the implications of this attack on the Sun and other recent events of a similar kind, IT firm 2e2’s security director, Russell Poole, stressed: “we need to be more vigilant.”
“In the past attacks were very general in nature, whereas now we are seeing these hacking groups focus in on a specific organisation”, Poole told PC Advisor.
“Essentially, hackers are constantly evolving their weapons of attack - the challenge for businesses is to stay one step ahead.”
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