By P Prem Kumar
KUALA LUMPUR
Cybercriminals claiming to be affiliated to the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant appear to have hacked the Malaysia Airlines (MAS) website, a group calling itself "Cyber Caliphate" redirecting customers from the troubled carrier's homepage Monday.
Www.malaysiaairlines.com was replaced with a page headed "404 - Plane Not Found," the check in and booking area becoming an image of a tuxedo-wearing lizard, and a caption underneath stated “Hacked by LIZARD SQUAD - OFFICIAL CYBER CALIPHATE.”
The page also included the Twitter accounts of @umgrobert and @umg_chris, while the words "ISIS will prevail" appeared in the browser tab, but they have since disappeared.
Users clicking on a link under the lizard image were re-directed to a Twitter page of the user "@lizardmafia," which featured a series of largely nonsensical posts.
Reports suggested that Lizard Squad is the same group responsible for the recent Christmas Day attack on the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live.
Malaysia Airlines - reeling from two disasters involving its aircraft last year along with heavy financial loss - utilized its Twitter account to apologize and advised customers to log in via an alternative web address.
The national flag carrier responded in an official statement in the afternoon, stating, however, that the website was not hacked, but its Domain Name Server (DNS) had been compromised and re-directed.
The airline said the servers - which contain sensitive information on airline customers - were still intact and no potential leak was possible.
It added that it expected the site to return to fully capability within the next 22 hours.
