Lenovo Website Hacked, Lizard Squad Claims Responsibility

On Wednesday, Lenovo Group Ltd announced that its website has been hacked, days after Superfish scandal happened. A few days ago Lenovo customers were asked to remove pre-installed software, Superfish, that was suspected to contain malware. This software was pre-installed on Lenovo laptops making the devices vulnerable to security threats.

The responsibility for the hacking has been claimed by Lizard Squad, on its Twitter page. Lizard Squad posted on its Twitter page, quoting the song from the movie "High School Musical", "We're breaking free! Soarin', flyin', there's not a star in heaven that we can't reach!” The hackers also posted a couple of screenshots of an email between Lenovo employees regarding the "Superfish" software.

Now Lizard Squad is a popular name as a notorious hacker group after their several high-profile attacks on Sony PlayStation Network and Microsoft's Xbox Live network last month. But members of the group are yet to be identified. In its statement to Reuters Lenovo said, "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.”

San Francisco-based security firm CloudFlare said hackers have transferred the domain to CloudFlare in order to point it to a defacement site. In an email to Reuters, Marc Rogers, principal security researcher at CloudFlare, wrote, "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.” Rogers also said CloudFlare was able to restore service before Lenovo recovered the domain, and the outage has been described as "quite small".

Since 2100 GMT on Wednesday, visitors to Lenovo website saw a slideshow of some young people looking into webcams and the song "Breaking Free" was playing in the background. The Verge reported the breach first. Till the time of publishing this article, Lenovo's website remained inaccessible and a message on the site said “504 – Gateway Timeout”.