Rupert Murdoch Dead

The digital vigilante groups Anonymous and LulzSec, it seems, plan to teach News Corp. a thing or two about hacking.

Just a day after the arrest of Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of New Corp.’s British subsidiary and editor of its The Sun newspaper for phone hacking charges, the hacker groups took credit Monday for defacing the paper’s website to redirect to a fake homepage (archived here) that claimed its owner, News Corp. chief executive Rupert Murdoch, had died of a drug overdose.

Worse may be ahead for the The Sun than mere graffiti: A hacker who goes by the handle Sabu claims that the hacker groups had also accessed The Sun‘s and defunct sister paper News Of The World’s emails, and may release them in coming days. “Sun/News of the world OWNED,” he writes. “We’re sitting on their emails. Press release tomorrow.”

Sabu and other Anonymous-related twitter feeds followed by twittering email addresses and passwords for Rebekah Brooks and Bill Akass, an editor who has held positions at The Sun and News of the World, and Danny Rogers, currently online editor at The Sun.

“We have owned Sun/News of the World,” added a tweet from LulzSec, the hacker group that went on a hacking spree targeting the CIA, Sony and PBS earlier this year only to supposedly disband last month. “That story is simply phase 1 – expect the lulz to flow in coming days.”