LulzSec lays smackdown on News International

LulzSec has come back from the dead to hack The Sun website, forcing News International to take all of its websites offline.

The hacktivist group announced an end to activities last month, after perpetrating a slew of attacks on organisations it took umbrage with.

Yesterday, LulzSec struck again redirecting people who visited The Sun to a fake story detailing the death of Rupert Murdoch, claiming he had died in his garden after ingesting "a large quantity of palladium."

If the hackers really have been able to access News International email archives and later release them, the impact could be enormous.

As the battle between the hackers and News International continued, LulzSec started redirecting visitors to its Twitter feed.

"TheSun.co.uk now redirects to our twitter feed. Hello, everyone that wanted to visit The Sun! How is your day? Good? Good!" a Twitter post read.

The attack spread to other News International sites, with LulzSec claiming the company's DNS servers, which translate web addresses into IP addresses of a website server, were all down, alongside "all 1,024 web addresses."

Anonymous has also been implicated in the attacks.

"This was the work of Lulz Security, dear media. We would like to give a shout-out to our bros at @AnonymousIRC though, we love those guys," another LulzSec tweet read.

Various tweets featuring email addresses and passwords have been circulating, with the tweeters claiming they were from a News International archive.

"If the hackers really have been able to access News International email archives and later release them, the impact could be enormous," said Nick Lowe, Check Point's head of sales for Western Europe.

The hack may have come as a result of a vulnerability in the server running new-times.co.uk the site where the fake Murdoch story was posted - a report on the Guardian indicated.

That site was established when the Times was building its paywall. Once the hackers had access to the server, they were able to play around with The Sun's content management system.

The hackers then inserted some Javascript into the 'breaking news' section of The Sun's site to redirect users to wherever they wanted.

The Daily Telegraph recently reported police were investigating whether News International employed computer hackers of its own.

Detectives from Scotland Yard's Specialist Crime Directorate were said to be looking into claims private investigators had been hired to carry out hacking for Murdoch's firm.

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown last week claimed News of the World had used malware to get hold of information, not just hack phones.