Even though we’re currently faced with things like cyber warfare and the possibility of economic armageddon, it’s still a good time to be alive. I say this because chances are, if you are reading this, it’s very likely that you’ll be around to watch as one of the most despicable media empires in the history of our planet capsizes and sinks into scandaled oblivion.If you’re just tuning in, I’m referring to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, the company famous for succeeding in the unthinkable task of disguising sleazy tabloid news as legitimate, unbiased journalism. More recently, they’ve also succeeded in becoming an international public enemy when it was alleged that one of their (now-euthanized) outlets, News of the World, had been doing things like paying off police officers and hacking into voicemails of 9/11 victims and former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, among others, to get their stories.
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And now, right when Murdoch is starting to ponder which remote island he should escape to in his billion dollar stealth submarine, hacker collective LulzSec has come out of retirement to fire volleys of digital cannonfire at some of News Corp’s already-splintering branches. Their first target: News Corp’s UK tabloid the Sun, which was defaced yesterday with a fake report that Murdoch had died after ingesting palladium in “his famous topiary garden” (the inclusion of “topiary” being the mark of a LuzSec member of the same name).
The group then posted dox (documents with personal information) on Rebekah Brooks, the recently-resigned chief executive of News International, the News Corp holding at the source of the scandal, along with many others tied to the media conglomerate. LulzSec eventually pulled back the curtain by redirecting the Sun’s traffic to their Twitter page. “Thank you for the love tonight,” they tweeted, confident as always. “I know we quit, but we couldn’t sit by with our wine watching this walnut-faced Murdoch clowning around.”
LulzSec offered the lovely MS Paint comic below to properly chronicle their exploits. For bonus lulz, the video above shows a group of flustered pundits trying to make sense of the latest hack attack on Sky News, a channel of British Sky Broadcasting, which, ironically enough, is the very company that News Corp was set to acquire before dropping their bid in light of the phone hacking scandal.
Even among governments, demands for News Corp’s blood look to be on the rise, and it would seem that for once, LulzSec is on the side of the very authorities they normally pester and undermine. If the past is any indication, however, it’s doubtful these parallels will last very long before the group goes back to its old, lulzy tricks.
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Even among governments, demands for News Corp’s blood look to be on the rise, and it would seem that for once, LulzSec is on the side of the very authorities they normally pester and undermine. If the past is any indication, however, it’s doubtful these parallels will last very long before the group goes back to its old, lulzy tricks.Dear Big Companies: Getting Hacked is Good For You