LulzSec says it hacked U.S. Senate website and Bethesda gaming servers
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The hacker group LulzSec is at it again. This time, the targets are the U.S. Senate and gaming company Bethesda Softworks, publisher of the popular shoot-’em-up video game Brink.
LulzSec -- whose name is a combination of ‘lulz,’ an Internet term often used to denote laughter at the victim of a prank, and ‘sec,’ short for ‘security’ -- said it holds the personal information of more than 200,000 players of Brink.
‘Bethesda, we broke into your site over two months ago,’ the group announced Monday over Twitter. ‘We’ve had all of your Brink users for weeks. Please fix your junk, thanks! ^_^’
The group also released a statement Monday, bragging about its hacking prowess and sketching out in basic terms how it went about ‘pillaging’ the Bethesda servers in ‘ninja mode’ with ‘heavy artilery Lulz Cannons.’
‘After mapping their internal network and thoroughly pillaging all of their servers, we grabbed their source code and database passwords, which we proceeded to shift silently back to our storage deck,’ the statement said.
It wasn’t anger or justice driving the Bethesda hack, LulzSec said, but rather admiration. The group loves the company’s games and wants to help ‘speed up the production’ of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a role-playing game currently under development.
But the group might release user data if the game developer is not open about how Skyrim is doing, LulzSec said.
The group had no love for the Senate, however, and on Monday released a ‘small, just-for-kicks’ amount of data it said was from the hacked Senate website. The data made public is relatively harmless but could signify that the hackers have more sensitive information in hand.
‘We don’t like the U.S. government very much,’ LulzSec said in a separate statement. ‘Their boats are weak, their lulz are low, and their sites aren’t very secure.’
‘Is this an act of war, gentlemen?’ it taunted.
The group -- previously known for posting false reports on the PBS website that dead rappers Tupac and Biggie Smalls were alive and well in New Zealand -- have been busy of late, claiming responsibility for hacks on websites for Sony, Nintendo, PBS and a site affiliated with the FBI.
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--Shan Li
posted to the website Pastebin.
