PBS Hack: Newshour Hacked With Fake Tupac Is Alive Story

by Bobby Kumar | May 30, 2011 at 05:54 am

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PBS Hacked Over Wikileaks Story? Newshour Website Posts Fake Tupac Is Alive In New Zealand Story

The PBS Newshour website has been hacked. The hack occurred Sunday night according to various media reports. Boing Boing identified a hacker or hackers going by the handle LulzSec.
One of the fake stories that caused a minor storm was that rapper Tupac Shakur is still alive and living in New Zealand. Well, Tupac is still dead, having died of gunshot wounds in Las Vegas in 1996.

Cached Version of Fake Tupac Is Alive Story

The hack was made public around 1130pm ET, Sunday, May 29, and included cracking the PBS server, posting a bogus news story and some defacements, and publishing what appear to be thousands of passwords.The information compromised and published included network, server, and database details and logins, as well as user login data for some PBS staff and contractors.

The PBS Newshour hack reportedly occurred because of a Frontline documentary on Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange.
PBS tried to manage the information by issuing posting from the Newshour Twitter Account.

If you missed it: our site has been accessed by hackers. Thanks for staying with us ^TG

The online security still seems to be an issue. At the time of this post the blogs for PBS were taken over by a video from some band singing about drinking whiskey.

And The Lulz Boat posted this two hours ago

Hey @PBS admins, you still trying to regain control? The Lulz Boat sails through your horrendously-outdated kernels! #Sownage next, folks.

The Australian IT publication say Lulz Sec has attacked other media organizations before:

It attacked the Fox Network from which it stole email addresses, usernames and passwords, and published the personal details of 250,000 applicants to The X-Factor show.