Hackers strike Malaysia Airlines website

HONG KONG – Hackers defaced the website of Malaysia Airlines on Monday and threatened to dump stolen information online after posting a glimpse of customer data obtained in the attack.

The airline’s site was down for at least seven hours, replaced by a message from the Lizard Squad hacker group, before the company brought it back online by midafternoon in Malaysia.

The hackers at first changed the site to display a message saying “404 – Plane Not Found” and that it was “Hacked by Cyber Caliphate,” with a photo of one of the airline’s Airbus A380 superjumbo jets. The browser tab for the website said “ISIS will prevail.”

Malaysia Airlines is struggling to recover from twin disasters last year, the disappearance of Flight 370, which authorities believed crashed 1,100 miles off Australia’s west coast, and the downing of Flight 17 over Ukraine.

The hackers later replaced the jet with a picture of a lizard in a top hat, monocle and tuxedo smoking a pipe. The Islamic State reference was removed and the claim of responsibility changed to “Lizard Squad – Official Cyber Caliphate,” with a link to the group’s Twitter account.

Notorious for their attention-seeking antics, Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility for a variety of hacks over the past year, most of them aimed at gaming or media companies. Lizard Squad occasionally makes tongue-in-cheek claims to support Islamic State, although there are no known links between the groups.

The airline said in a statement that it was a “temporary glitch” that didn’t affect passenger bookings. It said user data “remains secured.”

Lizard Squad, however, tweeted that it was “going to dump some loot found on malaysiaairlines.com servers soon,” and posted a link to a screenshot of what appeared to be a passenger flight booking from the airline’s internal email system.