LulzSec Hacks The Sun, Plants Fake Story of Murdoch's Death

Hacking group LulzSec re-emerged from the shadows Monday and published a faked version of U.K. tabloid The Sun, a link to tap into internal Sun staff data, and redirected the Sun's home page to the LulzSec Twitter account.

The fake site, at newtimes.co.uk/sun, was either taken down or unavailable about an hour after the LulzSec account posted the URL to Twitter. It showed up as part of an apparent introduction to the Times of London's new Web site.

The fake site's lead story covered the supposed death of Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corp., which owns both The Sun and The Times, both part of Murdoch's News Corp. media empire. According to the faked lead story, Murdoch's body was found at his home after an apparent overdose of palladium.

LulzSec also posted a hash, the username, and password belonging to a supposed network administrator of the paper. Inside, LulzSec promised was "hacked internal Sun staff data".

However, LulzSec's real coup was to seize control of the Sun's real home page, and redirect it to the group's Twitter page, which welcomed the paper's readers with a message: "TheSun.co.uk now redirects to our twitter feed. Hello, everyone that wanted to visit The Sun! How is your day? Good? Good!".

Previously, the Sun's home page redirected to the faked new-times.co.uk story about Murdoch's death.

"We have owned Sun/News of the World - that story is simply phase 1 - expect the lulz to flow in coming days," LulzSec tweeted.

In July, the News of the World was accused of hacking into the voicemail of a young murder victim while the investigation into her disappearance was still ongoing. The paper allegedly deleted voicemail messages, giving her parents false hope that she was alive and accessing her phone. The Daily Telegraph later reported that the newspaper also hacked the phones of family members whose relatives were killed or injured in the July 7, 2005 London bombings. There were also reports that the paper paid off London police officers for information.

Murdoch then shut down the News of the World in an attempt to redeem News Corp.'s image, and, some suspected, as a way to allow Murdoch to acquire a majority stake in BSkyB, a British broadcaster. Since then, senior members of Scotland Yard and News Corp. have resigned in the wake of s scandal that involved both newspaper executives and law enforcement. Murdoch himself is expected to answer questions from Parliament on Tuesday.

The hack comes as a re-emergence of sorts for LulzSec, which proclaimed the end of LulzSec at the end of June. It's unclear whether the group has reformed, or if other members hav taken their place. Imperva, a security group that examined the attacks, has told PCMag.com that LulzSec cracked databases and applications/ziffarticle>, and did not distribute malware.