LulzSec Redirects ‘The Sun’ Homepage To Fake Murdoch Death Story

http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/18/lulzsec-hacks-the-sun-redirects-homepage-to-fake-murdoch-death-story/

by ssclafani • 15 years ago

197 76 15 years ago

Firefox + RequestPolicy users are unaffected, thanks to RequestPolicy's defences against cross origin requests and redirects.

mike-cardwell2• 15 years ago

The LulzSec twitter feed is pretty active right now: https://twitter.com/#!/LulzSec

ntownsend• 15 years ago

The LulzSec twitter feed now appears to be empty.

_delirium• 15 years ago

All twitter.com pages come up empty for me for the past 30-40 minutes.

MatthewB• 15 years ago

I thought lulzsec said they were done after their 50 day mission? Guess they had to come back for this.

felipemnoa2• 15 years ago

Anybody can claim they are from lulzec.

walrus2• 15 years ago

False. Only those involved in LulzSec can post to the Twitter page.

Edit: Though, looking at the screenshots of the tweets on the TechCrunch page, they don't actually explicitly say it was them.

Edit 2: They did claim responsibility for it (just not in the tweets TechCrunch took a screenshot of).

GrangalanJr• 15 years ago

Sure, but can anybody post from Lulzsec's Twitter account?

sambeau2• 15 years ago

"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."

https://twitter.com/#!/LulzSec/status/93103067662258176

MisterT123• 15 years ago

Sabu was the leader/only person worth a damn of the bunch. The other kids he "teamed-up" with to make LulzSec have long since fled the group, but Sabu remains.

funthree3• 15 years ago

view-source:http://extras.thesun.co.uk/sol/breakingnewspage.html

edit: here's the right pastebin http://pastebin.com/ksu585vM

wesleyzhao3• 15 years ago

I read through the pastebin (the source is currently down) and I'm still not quite sure I get how Lulzsec did this. Could you (or someone) explain?

funthree3• 15 years ago

Heh, not sure how the pastebin got mixed up but I updated the post above. It was setting parent.location.href to the twitter account.

albertsun• 15 years ago

That looks like it's an iframe that normally has no content but which can be updated by commenting in the sample bits to put a breaking news headline onto the homepage. Because the CMSes that run newspaper websites are often terribly crufty, people resort to workarounds like this.

stephenheron• 15 years ago

A Javascript redirect has been added to http://extras.thesun.co.uk/sol/breakingnewspage.html.

http://pastebin.com/pWQtngDc (Line 8).

hendzen• 15 years ago

From the fake article:

One detective elaborates. "Officers on the scene report a broken glass, a box of vintage wine, and what seems to be a family album strewn across the floor, containing images from days gone by; some containing handpainted portraits of Murdoch in his early days, donning a top hat and monocle."

I've got to give it to them, that's hilarious.

felipemnoa2• 15 years ago

You could almost write a whole novel out of it.

AndyJPartridge2• 15 years ago

Agreed.

An image Lulzsec use as their identity linked below, for those that don't get the joke they made:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/7c/Lulz_Sec...

fabjan• 15 years ago

A box of vintage wine?

I thought these were boxes of wine: http://www.instructables.com/image/FO6BCL6F8DOSUHR/FINISH-OF...

uxp• 15 years ago

That's the joke.

veb3• 15 years ago

The Sun is now "dead".

Error 324 (net::ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE): The server closed the connection without sending any data.

veb3• 15 years ago

"Murdoch Meltdown Monday."

estel• 15 years ago

www. works for me, * . doesn't.

*.newsinternational.co.uk has that error uniformly.

veb3• 15 years ago

Internal Server Error - Read

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Reference #3.1fc38f18.1311029956.4e5f0fc

JonnieCache• 15 years ago

According to sabu they're going to release the sun's email dump tomorrow.

http://twitter.com/#!/anonymouSabu/status/93062692327264256

gapanalysis2• 15 years ago

So much attention, so little value to society

rayboyd• 15 years ago

Newscorp or LulzSec?

sambeau2• 15 years ago

Both. But in that order.

nathantross• 15 years ago

I wonder what Murdoch's response will be.

pyre2• 15 years ago

410 Gone?

trotsky2• 15 years ago

we'll show those jerks that hacking people's voicemail is unacceptable... by hacking their CMS.

delme302291• 15 years ago

Not to excuse Lulzsec's actions, but don't you think that we should hold an international news organization to a higher standard?

panacea2• 15 years ago

We should... they are sufficiently compensated for their position as an international news organisation, that they should operate at a higher standard.

But the internet has leveled the playing field. We should hold ourselves to a similar standard. Rather than lulzing as it burns. We should step up.

BrianBerk• 15 years ago

You're acting like this has anything to do with the News of the World allegations, other than the fact that it is what gave them the idea. It's mostly about them entertaining themselves. Lulzsec/antisec does have a message (essentially that the security industry is exploitative) but when they act under Lulzsec it really is just for the lulz.

trotsky2• 15 years ago

It's mostly about attention seeking.

mcantelon• 15 years ago

Seems like just deserts to me.

bluedanieru• 15 years ago

Hacking a dead girl's voicemail and lying about it to the police is not the same as hacking the CMS of the assholes responsible for it.

danssig• 15 years ago

why, that's almost as hypocritical as stopping enemy soldiers from shooting at you by... shooting at them!

grifaton• 15 years ago

Seems that the websites of all of NI's newspapers are down:

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/ http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/ http://www.thesun.co.uk/ http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/

anigbrowl4• 15 years ago

News International (NWSA) lost about 5% of its stock value today, and with a special session of the UK Parliament on Wednesday all bets are off - if Cameron is badly damaged enough, the Lib Dems could pull out of the government on principle leading to a snap election, although I would give that only a 20% chance of happening.

Murdoch is probably doomed; unless he pulls a rabbit out of a hat at the Parliamentary committee meeting tomorrow morning, his stockholders seem almost certain to revolt. I'm kind of surprised that his board hasn't cut him loose yet. This Lulzsec joke is in poor taste, but right on the money as a piece of satire. Curiously reminiscent of a 19th century Thomas Nast cartoon jesting about the funeral of NY Tribune publisher (and neckbeard extraordinaire) Horace Greeley.

EDIT: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-18/news-corp-said-to-c... suggests NWSA is indeed planning to give Murdoch the boot. Oh, how the mighty are fallen.

EDIT II: A more illuminating story from the trades http://www.adweek.com/news/television/if-rupert-goes-chase-c...

Edit III: I can't help noticing that Mr Carey looks an awful lot like the Lulzsec mascot with those curly mustachios. Coincidence? I think not!

I'll show myself out

teyc2• 15 years ago

Murdoch would have done better if he continued to make up news instead of trying to hack phones and report the truth.

thematt• 15 years ago

To be sure, he is ultimately responsible, but I highly doubt he himself sanctioned or approved of those actions.

anigbrowl4• 15 years ago

By the way here is the cartoon I mentioned above. I mis-remembered; it wasn't Greeley's funeral exactly, but suggesting he was near death. Greeley had run as a quixotic Democratic candidate in the 1872 election against President Ulysses S. Grant and his continued occupation of the South during the reconstruction period following the civil war. Greeley did poorly in the election, and this cartoon in Harper's Weekly, a strongly Republican magazine at that time, mocked his crusading style and suggested his campaign had no life left in it.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_OQAiMcEXtec/Re4nyF-d-bI/AAAAAAAAAA...

This is considered an especially cruel editorial cartoon, because Greeley's wife died immediately after the election; Greeley then went mad, and died a few weeks later at the end of November. He had suffered terrible financial losses by being caught in an investment scam earlier that year, and had lost control of his newspaper to another New York publisher, Whitelaw Reid, who fired him. I happened to be reading about these events just before the News International scandal blew up. Technology has changed a lot, human nature not so much.

jonursenbach• 15 years ago

It may be in poor taste, but they aren't the first to joke about Murdoch this way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1aZcsY-O8Q

speckledjim3• 15 years ago

> if Cameron is badly damaged enough, the Lib Dems could pull out of the government on principle leading to a snap election, although I would give that only a 20% chance of happening.

I'd say the chances of that are more like 0.2%. Most of the crap that went on was under Blair and Brown.

anigbrowl4• 15 years ago

Cameron's problem is that he hired former NoTW editor Andy Coulson to be his press secretary, and Coulson was forced to resign last January because of these hacking reports.

Not only did he apparently approve of and even commission hacking while a newspaper editor, he hired a private investigator who had been jailed for trying to plant drugs on other people (to create a newspaper scandal) and who later turned out to be an axe murderer. I don't mean that as a figure of speech; the fellow murdered his business partner with an axe. Now coulson did not know this was going to happen when he hired him, but Cameron (or at least his chief of staff) apparently knew about it before hiring Coulson and decided that he would make a fine addition to the team anyway, desite his extremely dodgy social circle. Add in the fact that Cameron has had a meeting with Murdoch or one of his top lieutenants on average every 2 weeks since becoming PM, at either 10 Downing Street or at Chequers (the PM's official country house, like Camp David for the President), and he looks uncomfortably close to a bunch of rather villainous people.

Remember that Cameron is governing as part of a coalition with the Liberal Democratic party, who are allied with him by necessity rather than by choice. If they pull out and Cameron loses a vote of confidence in Parliament, the government falls.

jchrisa• 15 years ago

This is the first time I've seen them "call their shots" - that is, this isn't just whoever they could bust into.

hack_edu• 15 years ago

This is untrue. Hacks against the Arizona cops and (secondary) attacks on Sony were 'called' as well.

sabat2• 15 years ago

It would have been a little more convincing if they'd bothered to use an apostrophe: Media Mogul's Body Discovered. Not to nitpick, but you want a media prank to work, you need to think like media people. They wouldn't forget punctuation.

speckledjim3• 15 years ago

The grauniad would.

From wikipedia:

"The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye.[109] This anagram played on The Guardian's reputation for frequent typographical errors, such as misspelling its own name as The Gaurdian."

sabat2• 15 years ago

Who would know (outside the UK)? Thanks for that. (Maybe the lack of apostrophe was on purpose!)

brickbrigade• 15 years ago

That's the thing that is bugging me the most as well.

Tyrannosaurs• 15 years ago

From Twitter:

"@thecoldgun It's like having a psycho mercenary on your side in a fight - you worry what they'll do when they're not."

LulzSec Redirects ‘The Sun’ Homepage To Fake Murdoch Death Story

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