
LulzSec Redirects ‘The Sun’ Homepage To Fake Murdoch Death Story - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/18/lulzsec-hacks-the-sun-redirects-homepage-to-fake-murdoch-death-story/
======
anigbrowl
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...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-18/news-corp-said-to-consider-
naming-chase-carey-as-ceo-suceeding-murdoch.html) 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...](http://www.adweek.com/news/television/if-rupert-goes-chase-carey-
next-news-corp-ceo-133321)

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_

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

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

~~~
klenwell
From what I've read, in the WSJ editorial today perhaps foremost, he sanctions
those activities implicitly if not explicitly. Don't forget in the midst of
all this the NY Post front page story alleging DSK accuser not only of being
hooker but pimped by her union! If it is the end of Murdoch, good riddance.

------
hendzen
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.

~~~
fabjan
A box of vintage wine?

I thought these were boxes of wine:
[http://www.instructables.com/image/FO6BCL6F8DOSUHR/FINISH-
OF...](http://www.instructables.com/image/FO6BCL6F8DOSUHR/FINISH-OFF-THE-BOX-
OF-WINE.jpg)

~~~
uxp
That's the joke.

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

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

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

~~~
felipemnoa
Anybody can claim they are from lulzec.

~~~
walrus
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).

~~~
parfe
You're making the mistake of thinking the twitter account is somehow
"official." It is, again, just an "anybody" claiming to be in LulzSec

~~~
AndyJPartridge
"Anybody" who has the password to the Lulzsec Twitter account. Or who, very
unlikely, hacked Twitter.

------
grifaton
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/>

------
mike-cardwell
The LulzSec twitter feed is pretty active right now:
<https://twitter.com/#!/LulzSec>

~~~
ntownsend
The LulzSec twitter feed now appears to be empty.

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

~~~
pyre
They're all erroring out now. If the traffic from the redirect was enough to
take one of News Corp's sites offline, I imagine that it's throwing Twitter to
a loop too.

------
gapanalysis
So much attention, so little value to society

~~~
rayboyd
Newscorp or LulzSec?

~~~
sambeau
Both. But in that order.

~~~
peterb
Satire is an important form of political commentary.

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

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

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

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

~~~
delme302291
Not to excuse Lulzsec's actions, but don't you think that we should hold an
international news organization to a higher standard?

~~~
panacea
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.

~~~
jbooth
That's sort of like telling insurgents that they should engage in an infantry
battle instead of roadside bombs. You can disagree with the cause but it's
pretty obvious, given their capabilities, that they have to play by different
rules.

Lulzsec don't have a half dozen global media organizations to push their point
of view -- they have funny website redirects and email dumps. So that's what
they're doing.

EDIT: Hey downmodder, read, I gave you permission to disagree with the cause
if you want. Comment is about tactics.

~~~
panacea
If we're torturing analogies, that's like a child saying "but he started it!"

There seems to be a momentum developing based on adults who have been
maintaining pressure on this story through legal investigative journalism...
setting fire to a paper bag filled with shit on their doorstep and ringing the
bell doesn't help.

(edit: didn't downvote you btw... that's for the drive-by kids)

------
Tyrannosaurs
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."

------
veb
The Sun is now "dead".

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

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

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

~~~
veb
Internal Server Error - Read

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

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

------
nathantross
I wonder what Murdoch's response will be.

~~~
pyre
410 Gone?

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

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

~~~
wesleyzhao
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?

~~~
funthree
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.

~~~
wesleyzhao
Thanks for updating! I've opened the new pastebin but still am not sure how it
all worked together with the sun website to get it to redirect.

~~~
wesleyzhao
Do you happen to know how it got there? Though the pastebin does not show it.

------
sabat
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.

~~~
speckledjim
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."

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

