ISIS, known for gruesome videos of beheading innocent captives, has either developed a sense of humor, albeit a distasteful one, or has attracted a delinquent fan-boy following.
Attackers claiming to represent ISIS carried out a denial-of-service attack on the website of national carrier Malaysia Airlines (MAS), compromising its domain name system, according to news reports.
The message “404-Plane Not Found” greeted site visitors for a few hours, recalling the the mysterious disappearance of Flight MH370 last year, along with “ISIS WILL PREVAIL” at the top of their browser`s window and the message “Hacked by Cyber Caliphate.”
Photo Credits: The Wall Street Journal
The hackers replaced the front page with an image of a tuxedo-wearing lizard, which read “Hacked by LIZARD SQUAD – OFFICIAL CYBER CALIPHATE.”
Both images displayed the Twitter handles for the accounts of two employees of UMG Events LLC, a company that hosts videogame events across the US.
“The group who did it is a group of kids who aren`t fond of our company,” one of the two men told the Wall Street Journal. “I presume they added our names to either scare us or warn us.”
The airline`s ticket-booking and other services were unavailable for a few hours.
“At this stage, Malaysia Airlines` web servers are intact,” the company said on its Facebook page. “The airline has resolved the issue with its service provider and the system is expected to be fully recovered within 22 hours.”
“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,” the company added.
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Alexandra started writing about IT at the dawn of the decade - when an iPad was an eye-injury patch, we were minus Google+ and we all had Jobs.
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