The hacker collective known as Lizard Squad turned its attention to Lenovo when it replaced Lenovo's website with a comical slideshow earlier today.
The site has since recovered, but for more than an hour on Feb. 25 Lenovo.com was displaying a slideshow of several pictures of a teenager, presumably the hacker, wearing a wig as the song "Breaking Free" from High School Musical played in the background.
The bizarre hack appears to have been carried out by Lizard Squad, whose Twitter handle @LizardCircle displayed at the top of site visitor's browsers when they accessed Lenovo.com. Clicking on the slideshow also redirected to the Lizard Squad Twitter page.
The source code for the hacked page included the text, "the new and improved rebranded Lenovo website featuring Ryan King and Rory Andrew Godfrey." Both King and Godfrey have been publicly identified as members of the hacker collective Lizard Squad.
Lizard Squad often has used its Twitter page to claim credit for hacking a number of high-profile targets, including the Vatican's website, Sony's PlayStation network, Battle.net and League of Legends, with distributed denial of service attacks. It also tweeted a fake bomb threat toward an American Airlines flight that resulted in the plane being grounded and the group was even linked to the Sony attack which has been blamed on North Korea.
The latest Twitter posts show screenshots of an email from a Timothy Fiala referring to the hacking of Lenovo.com under the text, "Sorry Tim, that's Junk apparently" and another saying "Lenovo removal bricks some devices? Great work Lenovo," neither of which help clarify whether the group is taking credit for the attack or not.
Whoever orchestrated the attack, it was likely in response to the Superfish scandal that has plagued Lenovo this week. The Chinese company, which is now the world's largest manufacturer of PCs, was found to be knowingly planting spyware or adware which was undetectable to antivirus software in some of its computers. Lenovo is already facing what will likely be the first of many lawsuits about the issue. Such has been the outrage at the scandal that it is hard to see how the company can ever regain the trust of paying customers.
Photo: Gulsen Ozcan | Flickr
