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| The front page of the Malaysia Airlines website showing the message from 'Cyber Caliphate', earlier today. – January 26, 2015. |
Loss-making Malaysia Airlines (MAS) today assured its customers that its website was secure, after a message posted by an entity claiming to be from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) militant group appeared on the flag carrier's website front page.
The national carrier said the incident was not hacking, but users were redirected to a hacker website when they keyed in the www.malaysiaairlines.com due to a compromise on its Domain Name System, or DNS, which translates a domain name to the Internet Protocol (IP) address.
Hundreds of Malaysia Airlines passengers complained that it was hard to access details of bookings due to the compromised DNS.
“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,” it said in a statement, adding that the system would be fully recovered by today.
MAS said its web servers are now intact and it had reported the case to CyberSecurity Malaysia as well as the transport ministry.
This morning, the national airline's website showed the words “Plane not found”, and was signed off as “Cyber Caliphate”, as a rap song played in the background.
The website title was also changed to “Isis will prevail”.
It is understood that only those using Telekom Malaysia's Unifi service were redirected to the page.
An AFP report said the hackers claimed to be from the "Lizard Squad", a group known for previous denial-of-service (DOS) attacks.
The Lizard Squad is a group of hackers that has caused havoc in the online world before, taking credit for attacks that took down the Sony PlayStation Network and Microsoft's Xbox Live network last month.
Isis, an extremist Sunni Muslim group, has seized large swathes of Syria and Iraq, where it has declared an Islamic "caliphate".
It has drawn thousands of fighters from across the globe to its anti-Western cause, and shocked the world with its video-taped executions of journalists and other foreigners it has captured, the most recent being a Japanese security contractor it claimed Sunday to have beheaded.
A second Japanese captive being held by the militants has also been threatened with execution.
The group, which uses social media in recruiting and spreading its message, is believed to harbour ambitions of launching a cyber-war against the West.
It is unclear why MAS was targeted but the hacking group said on its Twitter feed that it was "going to dump some loot found on malaysiaairlines.com servers soon". – January 26, 2015.
Source: http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/our-website-not-hacked-all-data-secure-says-mas
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