July 19, 2011
How LulzSec Exploited on the Security Mistakes of The Sun
The bogus story claimed that Murdoch had died after ingesting a "large quantity of palladium" (a rare metal*) before stumbling into his "famous topiary garden" (an in-joke reference to Topiary, the most famous member of LulzSec).
Later the same trick was used to redirect visitors of The Sun's website to LulzSec's Twitter feed.
Both hacks relied on exploiting security weaknesses on a site called new-times.co.uk/sun, which had been set up by News International while it was building a paywall for The Times. Hackers used an exploit, identified by The Guardian as likely to be a "local file inclusion" program, to exploit vulnerabilities in order to gain administrative control of this site. The site, although retired, was still linked to NI's Content Management System.
Hackers then used compromised access to the CMS behind The Sun's site to add their own redirection script to the "breaking news" element of the site. The rogue JavaScript was programmed to redirect surfers to locations under the control of hackers once the page reloaded. First it was pointed towards the spoofed story at new-times.co.uk/sun and later towards LulzSec's Twitter feed.
The level of compromised access may have allowed LulzSec access to NI's email database, but this remains unclear.
LulzSec famously disbanded last month after 50 days of mayhem that saw it attack numerous targets including FBI-affiliated security consultancies, UK police agency SOCA, numerous games publishers and Sony. In an update to its Twitter feed the group said it couldn't resist returning for one last gig. "Thank you for the love tonight. I know we quit, but we couldn't sit by with our wine watching this walnut-faced Murdoch clowning around."
The websites of The Sun and The Times were pulled down on Monday following the hack. Both have been restored. The server behind new-times.co.uk has been taken offline, probably permanently.
Meanwhile, the very-much-alive Rupert Murdoch is due to face a grilling from Parliament later today, when he will be expected to answer questions on the News of the World voicemail hacking scandal.
July 18, 2011
Lulzsec Redirects Homepage Murdoch-Owned 'The Sun' To @LulzSec Twitter Account
Hackers breached the security of Rupert Murdoch's Sun website and briefly redirected many visitors to a hoax article falsely claiming the tabloid media tycoon had been found dead in his garden.
The hack caused many people visiting thesun.co.uk to instead reach www.new-times.co.uk/sun/, which contained a story headlined "Media moguls [sic] body discovered". The breach came as several other Murdoch-owned sites, including The Times,The Sunday Times, newsinternational.co.uk, and rupertmurdoch.co.uk suffered outages that made them inaccessible. The domain name system servers used to revolve many of those sites weren't responding to queries at time of writing.
"Murdoch, aged 80, has said [sic] to have ingested a large quantity of palladium before stumbling into his famous topiary garden late last night, passing out in the early hours of the morning,” the bogus article claimed.
The redirections didn't work consistently, making it possible for many Sun visitors to reach the real site as intended. At time of writing, many attempts to reach the site caused redirects to the Twitter account of LulzSec, the prankster hacker collective that has made sport of attacking sites belonging to Sony, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other high-profile targets. LulzSec took responsibility for the Sun hack as well.
“It's not an easy thing to do,” Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of security firm WhiteHat Security, said of the redirection of The Sun's site. “If you can do that, you would classify it as being hacked.” It wasn't clear if the attackers had targeted the site's content management system, upstream provider, or another component.
DNS servers ns1.newsint.co.uk and ns0.newsint.co.uk, upon which the Murdoch-owned sites rely, did not respond to pings at time of writing. Trace routes to the servers' underlying IP addresses also failed.