The website of national carrier Malaysia Airlines Systems Bhd (MAS) was hacked today.
Allegedly hacked by an entity called “Cyber Caliphate”, who replaced the page’s title with the statement “ISIS will prevail”, the main page of the website was replaced by a photo of Airbus A380 jetliner bearing the MAS logo, with the words “404 — Plane not found”. Of course, Malaysians especially would immediately recognise that as a cruel joke because it’s a very obvious reference to the puzzling loss of flight MH370 last year with 239 people aboard.
Names of two hacking groups – Lizard Squad and UGNazi – and 2 individuals – Nathan Nye and Henry Blair Strater – were listed on the left side of the page, following the words “Greetz 2”, while three Twitter accounts were listed in the middle of the page. These account handles are: @LIZARDMAFIA, @UMGROBERT, and @UMG_CHRIS.
It’s also important to note that the Lizard Squad is a group of hackers that has caused havoc in the online world before, taking credit for attacks that took down the Sony PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox Live network last month. Prior to the hack, they released a series of tweets via their Twitter account.
In case you missed it, here:
Lets get the lizards together and have some fun today.
— Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) January 25, 2015
Cooking up something special. — Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) January 25, 2015
— Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) January 26, 2015
Going to dump some loot found on http://t.co/D9XYneQoaK servers soon — Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) January 26, 2015
Write Lizard Squad on your forehead, thanks. @MAS
— Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) January 26, 2015
It is understood that only users of Telekom Malaysia’s Unifi service are being directed to the hacked page.
Reasons behind the hacking is yet to be known.
It is unclear why Malaysia Airlines was targeted but concern has been rising in Malaysia after scores of its citizens were lured to the IS cause in the Middle East. Malaysian authorities last week said they have detained 120 people (including both men and women) suspected of having IS sympathies or planning to travel to Syria.
However, they’ve since removed the detainees suspected of supporting ISIS from the general jail population after some were found preaching the extremist ideology to fellow inmates.
UPDATE (1:35pm, 26th Jan):
Malaysia Airlines has released an official statement via their Facebook page to address the hacking issue, confirming that its Domain Name System (DNS) has been compromised where users are re-directed to a hacker website when the www.malaysiaairlines.com URL is keyed in.
At this stage, Malaysia Airlines’ web servers are intact and all user data remains intact. The system is expected to be fully recovered within 22 hours.
Read the full statement here:
