A hacker group unhappy with PBS Frontline’s hour-long documentary on WikiLeaks has hit back at the Public Broadcasting System by cracking its servers, posting thousands of stolen passwords, and adding a fake news story to a blog belonging to the august PBS Newshour.
On Sunday night, visitors to the Newshour website read the news that famed rapper Tupac Shakur had been found “alive and well” in New Zealand. The false story (Tupac died in 1996) was indexed by Google News, and spread rapidly through Facebook and Twitter, even after PBS pulled it down. “Again, our site has been hacked — please stay with us as we work on it,” read one of the Newshour’s several tweets responding to the incident Sunday.
The anonymous hacking group Lulzsec claimed credit for the attack in its Twitter feed, where it linked to several pages displaying information stolen in the hack. A calling card the intruders installed at pbs.org/lulz/ was still live by 2:00 a.m. EDT. The text read “All your base are belong to Lulzsec.” The title of the page was “FREE BRADLEY MANNING. FUCK FRONTLINE!”
On May 24, Frontline aired an hour-long documentary, “WikiSecrets”, that profiled suspected WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning. [Disclosure: Threat Level’s Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter were interviewed for the program]. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was interviewed at length for the documentary, roundly criticized the piece even before it aired, writing that the program was “hostile and misrepresents WikiLeaks’ views and tries to build an ‘espionage’ case against its founder, Julian Assange, and also the young soldier, Bradley Manning.”
Bradley Manning supporters have also criticized the program for its emphasis on Manning’s emotional problems, and for not exploring the highly-restrictive conditions of Manning’s pre-trial confinement, which were eased last month after nearly a year in custody.
“We just finished watching WikiSecrets and were less than impressed,” Lulzsec wrote in an announcement of the hack. “We decided to sail our Lulz Boat over to the PBS servers for further perusing.”
Earlier this month Lulzsec hacked Sony’s Japanese website, and before that Fox.com, where the group stole and posted 363 employee passwords, the names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of 73,000 people who had signed up for audition information for the upcoming Fox talent show The X-Factor. Lulzsec says it’s not part of Anonymous, despite sharing what appears to be a common ethos with the internet’s most famous gang of troublemakers.
In addition to the fake news story Sunday, the group tweeted links to pastebins of the internal IP addresses and names of PBS servers, a top-level view of PBS’ website database, and large caches of e-mail addresses and passwords, including those for 200 PBS affiliates around the country, dozens of PBS bloggers, and 1,500 third-party newspaper and media reporters who’d signed up for access to PBS’s “pressroom” of photos, clips and press releases.
Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.
See Also:
- Lamo Summoned to Washington for Bradley Manning Prosecution
- ‘Anonymous’ Denies Hacking PlayStation Network
- Video Captures Bradley Manning With Hacker Pals at Time of First Leaks
- PlayStation Network Hack: Who Did It?
- Bradley Manning to Be Moved From Quantico
- Suspected Wikileaks Source Described Crisis of Conscience Leading to Leaks
- U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe