The Sun's coverage of LulzSec mastermind hacker Ryan Clearly has got up the noses of others hackers, so much so, that they tried to take down News International servers hosting The Sun online.
LulSec has been taking down websites indiscriminately for fun (or Lulz) over the last few month. Sites that have been attacked vary from gaming sites like EVE online, police website SOCA (Serious And Organise Crime Agency) and now The Sun online.
The group has been garnering a massive amount of press attention, which culminated in the late-night raid of Ryan Clearly house on Monday. The mainstream media straight away declare the young “nerd” hacker as the mastermind of these operations and begun to attack him in the press as some “gas-sniffing” social outcast.
LulzSec apparently have admitted to hacking Sony's Playstation Network, which resulted in the system being taken down for a month and compromised 77 million users personal details.
This new group seem to have taken over from a previous hacking group Annonymous who attacked Sony after the heavy-handed treatment of fellow hacker George Hotz. He settled out of court with Sony and many had thought that the hacking would stop, while this might been the case for Annoymous – LulzSec have been attacking sites all over the world.
Whether LulSec and Annonymous are one in the same is unclear, but this latest bout of cyber terrorism is making mainstream news and is a real concern for governments and multinational corporations, so much so, that Ryan Cleary’s house was raided by SOCA officers and FBI agents.
According to the Guardian the attack hit News International servers at around 2am this morning, just few hours before Clearly was due in court. Its source said the attack largely originated in Russia. Although the perpetrators aren’t thought to be in Russia.
A senior source within News International confirmed that the attack affected third-party architecture (their server host) and was the effect of a crude, all be it effective, denial of service attack. This is done by a network of computers (usually called a bot-net) which makes repetitive demands on the internet server - thus bringing the site to its knees.
However, the attack did not delay the publication of the newspaper, and only caused a delay in some of the digital publication, the source said. Neither LulZsec nor anyone else has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.
Quite how this is going develop in the future is unclear, but LulzSec seem to be gathering quite a following on Twitter with over 200,000 followers and have reportedly started taking requests for who to hack next.
LulzSec tweeted about the arrest: "Clearly the UK police are so desperate to catch us that they’ve gone and arrested someone who is, at best, mildly associated with us. Lame.
"Best watch out, they can’t get us, so they’re going after people they think might know us. Defend yourselves."