Airline site hacked

Hackers defaced the website of Malaysia Airline on Monday and threatened to dump stolen information on line after posting a glimpse of customer data obtained in the attack. The airline’s site was down for at least seven hours, replaced by a massage from the lizard squad hacker group, before the company brought it back online by midafternoon in Malaysia.

Malaysia Airlines is struggling to recover foremost twin disasters last year, the disappearance of flight 370, which authorities believed crashed 1,800 kilometers [1,100 miles] off Australia’s west coast, and the downing of flight 17 over Ukraine. The hackers at first changed the site to display a massage saying ‘‘404 – plane not found’’ and that it was ‘’hacked by cyber caliphate,’’ with a photo of one of the airline’s Airbus A380 superjumbo jets. The browser tab for the website said ISIS will prevail. ‘’

The hackers later replaced the jet with a picture of a lizard in a top hat, monocle and tuxedo smoking a pipe. The Islamic state reference was removed and the claim of responsibility changed to ‘’Lizard squad –official cyber caliphate, ‘’with the link to the group’s Twitter account.

The airline said in the statement that it was a ‘’temporary glitch ‘’that didn’t affect passenger bookings and that the breach had been reported to Malaysia’s transport ministry and internet security agency. It said user data ‘’remains secured.’’ Lizard squad, however, tweeted that it was going to dump some loot found on Malaysiaairlines.com servers soon, and posted a link to a screenshot of what appeared to be a passenger flight booking from the airline’s internal email system. The lizard squad group last year claimed it was behind attacks on Sony’s online PlayStation network and Microsoft’s Xbox site.

Malaysia Airline said its domain name system was ‘’compromised’’ and users were redirected to the hacker group’s website.

The Islamic state group now holds about a third of both Syria and Iraq, territory it had declared a caliphate. Police in Malaysia have detained more than 50 people on suspicion of links to the extremist group, underscoring concerns held by Prime Minister Najib Razak that the spread of Islamic state ideology could led to conflict in predominantly Muslim Malaysia.