LulzSec brings the “lulz” to Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp

Barely a month after announcing its retirement, LulzSec has made a return to the limelight placing the beleaguered News Corporation (NewsCorp) and what it refers to as NewsCorp’s “clowning around” “walnut-faced” CEO Rupert Murdoch firmly in the “Lulz” targets.

Following a typically mysterious promise to “engage in a mystery operation that will cause mayhem” in the previous week, the mystery operation has begun. Using what has come to be seen as its official Twitter account, the hacktivist group announced the beginning of a sustained attack against NewsCorp, and its UK tabloid newspaper’s website — The Sun.

As has come to be expected with this particular hacktivist group, the attack had, what in its and its legion of fans’ opinions, was a humourous spin all to bring on the “lulz”.

In a series of tweets, LulzSec reported the creation of a (no longer active at time of writing) fake Sun website. This site “reported” the “death” of Rupert Murdoch, NewsCorp’s CEO after he “ingested a large quantity of palladium”.

Screengrab taken by @BilboBaggins2K

The crux of the attack was the redirection of traffic from the Sun’s website to this fake page.

Following what LulzSec characterised as their Sun site having “been hit so hard with redirects that it’s now down”, LulzSec then came up with what it called “a better idea”; redirecting all of the Sun.co.uk traffic to their Twitter feed. At the time of writing The Sun had rectified all hacks.

In a series of tweets during this “first phase” of the attack LulzSec claimed this to be “showing you a very small surface; the real damage is currently giving the admins heart attacks”, and claimed to have “wrecked” the Sun’s parent company, News International as well. News International is the UK subsidiary of NewsCorp.

This comes in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal in the UK. The scandal — which has greatly angered the public — also led to the shock closure of the News of the World, another UK NewsCorp tabloid, the resignation of trusted Murdoch lieutenant Rebekah Brook, and multiple shockwaves in the British government.

A News International spokeswoman has been quoted as saying that the media house was “aware” of the attack.