The Lizard Squad hacking crew seems to enjoy attention-grabbing attacks. After hacking PlayStation Network and Xbox Live on Christmas Day, Lizard Squad has attacked the Malaysian Airlines website and posted a disturbing message.
For a few hours on Monday morning, the Malaysia Airlines website displayed the words “404 – Plane Not Found.” It also featured the words “ISIS Will Prevail” in the browser tab for the page.
The message has been taken down and the normal site is back up and running.
404, of course, is the common error message that appears when a website cannot find the requested page. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has still not been found.
On Twitter, Lizard Squad also claimed to have stolen sensitive information during the attack:
The hacked Malaysia Airlines website message also said “Hacked by LIZARD SQUAD – OFFICIAL CYBER CALIPHATE” in reference to the fact that ISIS has declared an Islamic caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
Malaysia Airlines explains the hack
In a statement, Malaysia Airlines claims that its Domain Name System had been compromised, which allowed hackers to point website traffic to a separate web server.
In other words, the website itself had not been compromised and Malaysia Airlines’ own web servers were intact:
“This temporary glitch does not affect bookings” and user data “remains secured.” The website reportedly took 22 hours to restore, although it’s back up and running at the time of writing.
