Recently-disbanded hacking collective LulzSec, who made waves this summer by hacking high-profile organisations such as the FBI, Sony and the US Senate, have apparently reformed to join the backlash currently engulfing Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
The crisis surrounding News Corp stems from the hacking of phones by private investigators on the payroll of the now-shuttered News of the World. The revelations surrounding the extent of corruption within the defunct tabloid have sent shockwaves through the British political system, and has so far resulted in the resignation of Rebekah Brooks, the newspaper’s former editor, Rupert Murdoch’s second-in-commend Les Hinton, and two senior officers from the London Metropolitan Police force, whose officers have been accused of accepting bribes from journalists.
News Corp is now facing a series of parliamentary investigations (the first of which took place today), and has also attracted the attention of the FBI for allegations of similarly disreputable behaviour in Murdoch’s stateside publications.
Although LulzSec publicly separated and rejoined larger Internet miscreants Anonymous last month, it would appear the revelations about Murdoch’s corporation have stirred them into action once again. The website of The Sun, the UK’s most popular daily tabloid (also owned by Murdoch) was hacked and redirected to a similar looking site with a front page splash claiming Rupert Murdoch had been found dead in his topiary garden. This is a reference to a hacker by the name of Topiary, believed to be Scandinavian, who is a senior member of LulzSec.
In response to the hack the websites of The Sun and The Times, Murdoch’s UK broadsheet, were both taken offline for several hours.
In addition to the hack, LulzSec also claim to be in possession a cache on internal Sun emails, and login information for senior Murdoch staff featuring embarassingly insecure passwords. Murdoch’s other media properties, including Fox News and the Wall Street Journal in the US, have proven predictably reticent to give the phone hacking story the proper coverage, with Fox even urging its viewers to “move on”. Any ill-gotten internal emails could shed an interesting light on the editorial decisions surrounding how to cover the disrobing of one’s parent company.
The LulzSec twitter account was in predictably jovial mood, tweeting –
“Arrest us. We dare you. We are the unstoppable hacking generation and you are a wasted old sack of shit, Murdoch. ROW ROW FIGHT THE POWER!”
