Social media sites knocked offline, #LizardSquad hack group claims responsibility

 

 

The hacking group Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility for what it said was an attack that briefly knocked several social networking sites, including Facebook and Instagram, offline early Tuesday. 

The Facebook glitch was reported in the United States, Asia, Australia, and the U.K. and affected access to the site from personal computers and from Facebook's mobile app. The social media giant's Instagram service was also inaccessible.

Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for the outage in a Twitter posting that listed the sites it said it had affected, which included matchmaking app Tinder, AIM, and HipChat. The message concluded with the hashtagged statements "offline" and "LizardSquad."

Facebook denied that it had been hacked and claimed that the disruption was caused by a technical change it made to the site. On its website for developers, Facebook said the "major outage" lasted one hour.

The LizardSquad group has previously claimed to have been responsible for a Christmas Day outage that affected Xbox and PlayStation Live services late last year. On Monday, the group said it had hacked the website of Malaysia Airlines, changing the site to display a message reading "404 - Plane Not Found" and that it was "Hacked by Cyber Caliphate," with a photo of one of the airline's Airbus A380 superjumbo jets. The browser tab for the website said "ISIS will prevail", a reference to the Islamic State terror group.

Lizard Squad occasionally makes tongue-in-cheek claims to support Islamic State, although there are no known links between the groups. The group also claimed that it was "going to dump some loot found on malaysiaairlines.com servers soon," and posted a link to a screenshot of what appeared to be a passenger flight booking from the airline's internal email system.

Facebook has about 1.35 billion active users and Instagram has some 300 million.
News of the Facebook outage set rival social network Twitter alight, propelling the hashtag "facebookdown" to top trend on the site. It comes ahead of Facebook reporting its quarterly earnings on Wednesday.

As access to Facebook returned, some users in Asia reported that the site was loading slowly or not offering full functionality.

The temporary loss of service may be Facebook's biggest outage since Sept. 24, 2010 when it was down for about 2.5 hours.

Lizard Squad may have hacked Facebook

NEW DELHI: Hacker collective Lizard Squad, which recently took down Malaysia Airlines website, hinted that they may have had something to do with the outage faced by Facebook and Instagram on Tuesday morning.

Facebook and Instagram were down for about an hour leading to a wave of panicky messages on Twitter, with people trying to assess the situation.

Lizard Squad posted a cryptic message on their Twitter feed: "Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad." The message was tweeted close to noon, IST from their Twitter handle @LizardMafia. The Tweet got nearly 4800 retweets.

"If only we didn't use twitter to communicate..." they tweeted soon afterwards, and followed it up with, "More to come soon. Side note: We're still organizing the @MAS email dump, stay tuned for that." @MAS is the Malaysia Airlines' official Twitter handle. The person behind the Twitter account also dared followers with a picture, asking them to "dox" him or reveal his real identity.

The Lizard squad also claimed that MySpace was down, but it was discovered to be working when TOI accessed it.

Facebook responded with a statement that debunked the Squad claim: "Earlier this evening many people had trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram. This was not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems. We moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100% for everyone."

Malaysia Airlines website hacked by group claiming to support ISIS

FOXNEWS

HONG KONG –  The website of Malaysia Airlines was hacked Monday by a group that proclaimed support for the militant Islamic State group and also vowed to release data stolen from the site.

The airline's site was down for at least seven hours, replaced by a message from the hacker group, before the company brought it back online by mid-afternoon in Malaysia.

The hackers at first changed the site to display a message saying "404 - Plane Not Found" and that it was "Hacked by Cyber Caliphate," with a photo of one of the airline's Airbus A380 superjumbo jets. The browser tab for the website said "ISIS will prevail."

Malaysia Airlines is struggling to recover from twin disasters last year, including the disappearance of Flight 370, which authorities believed crashed 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) off Australia's west coast, and the downing of Flight 17 over Ukraine.

The hackers later replaced the jet with a picture of a lizard in a top hat, monocle and tuxedo smoking a pipe. The Islamic State reference was removed and the claim of responsibility changed to "Lizard Squad - Official Cyber Caliphate," with a link to the group's Twitter account.

The airline said in a statement that it was a "temporary glitch" that didn't affect passenger bookings and that the breach had been reported to Malaysia's transport ministry and Internet security agency. It said user data "remains secured."

The group, however, tweeted that it was "going to dump some loot found on malaysiaairlines.com servers soon," and posted a link to a screenshot of what appeared to be a passenger flight booking from the airline's internal email system.

The particular booking was made by Malaysian Amy Keh, who said she had made it in October for her mother and two relatives to travel from Kuala Lumpur to Taiwan in March.

"I am a bit worried about their security. Now the whole world knows that they will be going to Taipei," said Keh, who logged on Monday to check the itinerary. She said the website looked different and called the airline, which told her of the hacking. However, she only found out when contacted by The Associated Press that the travel information was posted online
The Lizard Squad group last year claimed it was behind attacks on Sony's online PlayStation network and Microsoft's Xbox site.

In August, it also tweeted to American Airlines that there might be explosives on a plane carrying the president of Sony Online Entertainment, which makes video games, forcing the flight to be diverted.
Explaining how the hack had occurred, Malaysia Airlines said its domain name system was "compromised" and users were redirected to the hacker group's website. The domain name system translates web addresses typed into browsers into the numbers that computers use to identify and connect with each other on the Internet.

The Islamic State group now holds about a third of both Syria and Iraq, territory it has declared a caliphate. Police in Malaysia detained 43 people last year on suspicion of links to the extremist group, underscoring concerns held by Prime Minister Najib Razak that the spread of Islamic State ideology could lead to conflict in predominantly Muslim Malaysia