A GROUP OF hackers which has made apparent references to Islamic State jihadists has taken over the website of troubled carrier Malaysia Airlines.
Earlier this morning, hackers from the Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for a stunt which led to traffic to the airline’s site being redirected to a page with the message: “404 – Plane Not Found”.
The redirect page also showed an image of a tuxedo-wearing lizard and the words: “Hacked by Cyber Caliphate”.
The breach comes 10 months after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared en-route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.
The airline’s website was later restored and it issued a statement on its Facebook page to say its computer system was still “intact”.
Malaysia Airlines assures customers and clients that its website was not hacked and this temporary glitch does not affect their bookings and that user data remains secured,” it said.
“The matter has also been immediately reported to CyberSecurity Malaysia and the Ministry of Transport.”
But a Twitter account calling itself the Lizard Squad said the airline was lying about its network being secure.
‘Planted ISIS flag’
The group has previously claimed responsibility for a string of hacking incidents and denial-of-service attacks, including the Christmas outage of both Sony’s Playstation and Microsoft’s Xbox online networks.
After an earlier attack on Sony’s systems, another Twitter account calling itself the Lizard Squad said it had “planted the ISIS flag on Sony’s servers”.
It has also been reported that in some regions for the latest incident the Malaysia Airlines homepage was redirecting to another site which carried the words: “ISIS will prevail”.
However it is unknown what, if any, links the hackers actually have to the jihadist group which has carved out a self-declared Islamic “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq.
Yesterday the group, which has murdered several journalists and aid workers, confirmed it had executed one of two Japanese hostages it was currently holding after releasing a video showing the man’s beheaded corpse.
With AFP
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