Hacker group LulzSec has apparently undergone a type of resurrection. A new flurry of hackers, calling themselves LulzSec reborn, are claiming to have exposed more than 170,000 accounts belonging to members of a US dating website for single soldiers.
The LA Times has reported that, after months of lying low, LulzSec has reinvented itself and is now calling itself ‘LulzSec reborn’.
LulzSec, which is affiliated with Anonymous, carried out several high-profile cyber attacks against Sony, Nintendo, Fox.com and the US Senate last year.
A couple of weeks ago, the FBI swooped in on two alleged Irish hackers as part of the arrest of five LulzSec hackers charged with crimes that have affected more than 1m people. At the time, the Irish suspects were named as Darren Martyn, aka, ‘Pwnsauce’ and Donncha O’Cearbhail, aka, ‘Palladium’.
Who are LulzSec reborn?
The new group – LulzSec reborn – is claiming to have obtained thousands of email addresses belonging to members of MilitarySingles.com.
In a 25 March post on Pastebin, LulzSec reborn said, “The website http://www.militarysingles.com/ was recently closed day ago or so, so we dumped email db There are emails such as @us.army.mil ; @carney.navy.mil ; @greatlakes.cnet.navy.mil ; @microsoft.com ; etc..”
The group also posted that it had been “Laughing at your security since 2011!” It claimed to have achieved a total dump of 170,937 accounts belonging to members of MilitarySingles.com.
Investigating the claim
ESingles Inc, the parent company of MilitarySingles.com, is investigating the hacking claim.
Robert Goebel, CEO of ESingles, told the LA Times that the site had enacted security procedures in response to the hacking claim.
“Regardless of whether it was a true claim or false claim, we’re treating it as though it’s true just to be safe,” he said.
However, Goebel indicated he did not think the dating site was really hacked. He said the site was down at the weekend due to maintenance work that had been scheduled.
He also queried how the purported hackers could have dumped more than 170,00 accounts because he said MilitarySingles.com only has about 140,000 members.
Goebel said site members shouldn’t worry because even if there had been a successful hack, passwords on MilitarySingles.com are encrypted so accounts would be safe.
