They're back. The hacker gang LulzSec, after declaring retirement last month, cracked the Rupert Murdoch–owned New Times on Monday and used it to host a fake news story declaring that the embattled media mogul had been found dead at his home.
The web defacement took the form of a mock article from Murdock's The Sun, with the headline "Media moguls body discoverd" [sic]. The text goes on to claim falsely that Murdoch "ingested a large quantity of palladium before stumbling into his famous topiary garden late last night."
"We have owned Sun/News of the World - that story is simply phase 1 - expect the lulz to flow in coming days," the group announced on its Twitter feed.
At the same time, some visitors were redirected from The Sun's home page to the fake story, which appeared to have been blocked within an hour.
Murdoch's news empire has been badly shaken in the last month by a massive voice-mail hacking scandal involving reporters at the UK-based News of the World, which Murdoch recently shuttered.
In May, LulzSec made news for the the first time with a similar attack against the website of PBS Newshour, in which it posted a false news story announcing that deceased rapper Tupac Shakur had been found “alive and well” in New Zealand. By then the gang had already hacked Sony’s Japanese website, and before that Fox.com, where the group stole and posted 363 employee passwords, the names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of 73,000 people who had signed up for audition information for the Fox talent show The X-Factor.
Subsequent hack targets included the Arizona Department of Public Safety. By late June, though, web vigilantes and rival hackers had exposed what they said were the real identities of LulzSec's members, and on June 25 LulzSec announced its retirement. Group leader "Sabu" joined an outfit called AnonymousIRC, which continued targeting corporations and users, including the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.
