The Asian airline company Malaysia Airlines just can’t stay away from the spotlight. The company website was hacked on Monday for unknown reasons by the Cyber Caliphate group of hackers in support of the Islamic State – the same group that hacked the Central Command Twitter and YouTube accounts earlier this month.
Visitors attempting to access the airline’s website in the morning were instead greeted with a picture of and Airbus A380 Airplane with the messages “404 – Plane Not Found” and “Hacked by Cyber Caliphate” displayed above the plane – presumably in attempt to make joke out of the Malaysian Airlines unfortunate loss of the two airplanes.
Later, the picture on the website has changed once again, this time to the notorious pipe-smoking, monocle-wearing lizard in a tuxedo and a hat. Under it was displayed: “Hacked by Lizard Squad, Official Cyber Caliphate.” Lizard Squad, for those who don’t know, is the infamous group of hackers that is supposedly responsible for the hacking of Microsoft and Sony on Christmas day, causing millions of gamers around the world to be unable to play online on their consoles.
Curiously, within both of these pictures, there is a message asking to “follow CyberCaliphate on Twitter,” followed by Twitter handles for two men who work for UMG Events LLC, a company organizing video game events throughout the United States. It’s unclear why they were included in the pictures.
“We were not involved in any website being hacked in any way,” said Chris Tuck of UGM Events. “The group who did it is a group of kids who aren’t fond of our company,” he said. “I presume they added our names to either scare us or warn us.”
In response to the incident, the Malaysian Airlines issued the following statement on their Facebook page: “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.” According to initial investigation by the company, it seems only their DNS have been compromised and redirected the site visitors to a different server.
