Data leak fears as Malaysia Airlines website is hacked

The website of Malaysia Airlines has been hacked by a group that proclaimed support for the Islamic State and also vowed to release data stolen from the site.

The airline’s site was down for at least seven hours yesterday, replaced by a message from the hacker group, before the company brought it back online by mid-afternoon in Malaysia.

The hackers at first changed the site to display a message 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”.

Malaysia Airlines is struggling to recover from twin disasters last year, including the disappearance of Flight 370, which authorities believe crashed 1,800km off Australia’s west coast, and the downing of Flight 17 over Ukraine.

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 a link to the group’s Twitter account.

The airline said in a statement 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”.

The group, 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.