Lenovo website hacked; Lizard Squad claims responsibility

China's Lenovo Group Ltd website was hacked, the company said on Wednesday, days after the U.S. government advised Lenovo customers to remove a pre-installed virus-like software, "Superfish", on laptops that makes the devices more vulnerable to attacks.

Hacking group Lizard Squad claimed to be behind the attacks, according to its Twitter page.

Lizard Squad has taken credit for several high-profile outages, including attacks that took down Sony Corp's PlayStation Network and Microsoft Corp's Xbox Live network last month. Members of the group have not been identified.

"The domain name service server hosting Lenovo's website was hacked. We do not have any further information at this time to share. We'll update as soon as possible," Lenovo said in a statement to Reuters.

San Francisco-based security firm CloudFlare said hackers transferred the domain to CloudFlare in order to point it to a defacement site.

"As soon as we at CloudFlare noticed, we seized the account and worked with Lenovo to restore service while they worked to recover their domain," Marc Rogers, Principal Security Researcher at CloudFlare, said in an email to Reuters.

Starting 4 p.m. ET (2100 GMT) on Wednesday, visitors to the Lenovo website saw a slideshow of young people looking into webcams and the song "Breaking Free" playing in the background, according to The Verge, which first reported the breach.

"We're breaking free! Soarin', flyin', there's not a star in heaven that we can't reach!," Lizard Squad posted on its Twitter page, quoting the song from the movie "High School Musical".





The hackers also posted a couple of screenshots of an email between Lenovo employees regarding the "Superfish" software.



The Department of Homeland Security said in an alert on Friday that the "Superfish" program makes users vulnerable to a type of cyberattack known as SSL spoofing, in which remote attackers can read encrypted web traffic, redirect traffic from official websites to spoofs, and perform other attacks.

Rogers also said CloudFlare was able to restore service before Lenovo recovered the domain, suggesting that the outage was probably "quite small".

However, Lenovo's website was inaccessible at 7:54 p.m. ET (0054 GMT). A message said the site was unavailable due to system maintenance.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Sony works to restore PlayStation after attack

BOSTON -- Sony Corp worked for a third day on Saturday to restore services to its PlayStation network as the FBI said it was looking into the disruption, which began on Christmas Day.

"We are aware of the reports and are investigating the Sony PlayStation matter," Federal Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman Jenny Shearer said via email. She did not elaborate.

Meanwhile, Sony said on Saturday that the attack had prevented some people who received consoles for Christmas from using their new machines on the PlayStation network, which lets gamers compete with people around the world via the Internet.

"If you received a PlayStation console over the holidays and have been unable to log onto the network, know that this problem is temporary and is not caused by your game console," Sony executive Catherine Jensen said on the company's U.S. PlayStation blog.

Some customers posted complaints about the outage on the blog. "Three days without PSN. That's absurd," said one of them.

"We understand your frustration," Jensen responded early Saturday afternoon. "Our engineers are working to restore service as quickly as possible!"

Later in the day she said the company had restored access for some users and would keep bringing more back online. Sony declined to say how many of PSN's 56 millions users had been affected by the attack.

The blog said the problems were the result of "high levels of traffic designed to disrupt connectivity and online game play," which is widely known as a distributed denial-of-service attack.

It was Sony's second recent high-profile encounter with hackers after an unprecedented attack on its Hollywood studio, which the U.S. government attributed to North Korea and linked to the release of the low-brow comedy "The Interview."

A hacker activist group known as Lizard Squad said it was responsible for the PSN outage as well as delays on Microsoft's Corp's Xbox network; Microsoft quickly fixed the problem.

The group has claimed responsibility for previous attacks, including ones on PSN in early December and August.

The August attack coincided with a bomb scare in which Lizard Squad tweeted to American Airlines that it heard explosives were on board a Dallas-to-San Diego flight carrying an executive with Sony Online Entertainment.

Sony has been the victim of some of the most notorious cyberattacks in history. Besides the breach at its Hollywood studio, hackers stole data belonging to 77 million PlayStation Network users in 2011.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com