The Malaysia Airlines website was commandeered Monday by hackers who referenced the Islamic State jihadists and claimed to be from the “Lizard Squad”, a group known for previous denial-of-service attacks.

The website’s front page was replaced with an image of a tuxedo-wearing lizard, and read “Hacked by LIZARD SQUAD — OFFICIAL CYBER CALIPHATE”.

It also carried the headline “404 – Plane Not Found”, an apparent reference to the airlines’ puzzling loss of flight MH370 last year with 239 people aboard.

Media reports said versions of the takeover in some regions included the wording “ISIS will prevail”.

The airline did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Lizard Squad is a group of hackers that has caused havoc in the online world before, taking credit for attacks that took down the Sony PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox Live network last month.

The Islamic State, an extremist Sunni Muslim group, has seized large swathes of Syria and Iraq, where it has declared an Islamic “caliphate”.

It has drawn thousands of fighters from across the globe to its anti-Western cause, and shocked the world with its video-taped executions of journalists and other foreigners it has captured, the most recent being a Japanese security contractor it claimed Sunday to have beheaded.

A second Japanese captive being held by the militants has also been threatened with execution.

The IS group, which uses social media in recruiting and spreading its message, is believed to harbour ambitions of launching a cyber-war against the West.

It is unclear why Malaysia Airlines was targeted.

But concern has been rising in Malaysia after scores of its citizens were lured to the IS cause in the Middle East. Malaysian authorities last week said they have detained 120 people suspected of having IS sympathies or planning to travel to Syria.

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KIEV – Hackers attacked Ukraine’s election commission website Saturday on the eve of parliamentary polls, officials said, but they denied Russian reports that the vote counting system itself had been put out of action.

The www.cvk.gov.ua site, run by the commission in charge of organising Sunday’s election, briefly shut down. Ukrainian security officials blamed a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, a method that can slow down or disable a network by flooding it with communications requests.

“There is a DDoS attack on the commission’s site,” the government information security service said on its Facebook page.

The security service said the attack was “predictable” and that measures had been prepared in advance to ensure that the election site could not be completely taken down.

“If a site runs slowly, that doesn’t mean it has been destroyed by hackers,” the statement said.

A report on Russia’s state news agency RIA Novosti quoted a statement on the personal website of the Ukrainian prosecutor general saying that the electronic vote counting system was out of order and that Sunday’s ballots would have to be counted by hand.

The commission spokesman, Kostyantyn Khivrenko, called the RIA Novosti report a “fake”.

“The Central Election Commission will issue preliminary results of the voting with the help of the Vybory information-analytical system. This system is working normally,” he said.

The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), the country’s lead internal security agency, said that “the physical protection of the central server and its regional components has been ensured”.

“Any statements regarding the alleged successful unauthorised intrusions into the cyber space of the Central Election Commission or the elements of the elections systems do not correspond to the facts. Hackers are controlling nothing,” Markiyan Lubkivskyy, an adviser to the SBU chief, said.

An SBU spokeswoman told AFP that attacks on the election commission’s site began a week ago, “but so far we have dealt with them”.

Outdoor video screens hacked?

The cyber troubles came as Ukraine prepared for an election overshadowed by a bloody pro-Russian insurgency in the country’s east and the annexation by Russia of the Crimean province in the south.

Pro-Western and nationalist parties are expected to dominate the new parliament. In another possible sign of cyber tensions, the Ukrainska Pravda news website on Friday reported that outdoor video screens across Kiev were briefly hacked.

The screens, which are used for advertising, including pre-election political ads, reportedly started to display “scary and horrible images,” the report said.

Engineers went out “to physically unplug” the screens, according to the report.

The report could not be confirmed, but footage on YouTube purporting to capture the incident showed a street screen abruptly switching to footage of destroyed buildings and dead bodies, as well as the images of two nationalist politicians running for parliament, with the words “war criminals”.

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The fallout from the Target data breach has put security firm Trustwave in the middle of a class action lawsuit.

The complaint, which was filed March 24 in U.S. District Court in Illinois, names both Target and Trustwave and accuses the security company of failing to protect Target’s systems.

Contacted by SecurityWeek, a Trustwave spokesperson said the company does not comment on pending litigation or confirm the identities of customers.

The complaint was filed on behalf of Trustmark National Bank and Green Bank, N.A., and “all other similarly situated financial institutions.”

In the compliant, the banks state Trustwave was hired by Target to protect and monitor the retailer’s systems, and that the security vendor scanned Target’s systems on Sept. 20, 2013, and found no vulnerabilities were present. Because of vulnerabilities in Target’s network however, millions of payment card records were stolen, the complaint states.

“Additionally…Trustwave also provided round-the-clock monitoring services to Target, which monitoring was intended to detect intrusions into Target’s systems and compromises of PII [personally-identifiable information] or other sensitive data,” the complaint reads. “In fact, however, the Data Breach continued for nearly three weeks on Trustwave’s watch.”

“Trustwave failed to live up to its promises, or to meet industry standards,” the complaint continues. “Trustwave’s failings, in turn, allowed hackers to cause the Data Breach and to steal Target customers’ PII and sensitive payment card information. In addition, Trustwave failed to timely discover and report the Data Breach to Target or the public.”

The investigation into the breach revealed that Target’s systems were compromised from Nov. 27 to Dec. 15. The data breach, which also included the theft of information such as email and mailing addresses for millions of Target customers, was one of the biggest such incidents in recent history. In February, the Consumer Bankers Association (CBA) and the Credit Union National Association (CUNA) reported that costs associated with the breach exceed $ 200 million. Much of that figure – $ 172 million – comes from the cost of replacing cards for CBA members, while CUNA reported that the cost to credit unions had reached $ 30.6 million.

“A recent analysis by global investment banking firm Jefferies suggests that payment card issuers could sustain upwards of $ 1 billion of damages as a result of the Target Data Breach based on an estimated 4.8 million to 7.2 million stolen and compromised Payment Cards being used to make fraudulent purchases and unauthorized cash withdrawals,” according to the complaint. “These costs fall on Trustmark and the other Class members, even though they had nothing to do with causing the Data Breach and could not have avoided it.”

The suit asks for unspecified damages. 

Just last week, TrustWave announced that it had acquired Cenzic, Inc., a maker of application security testing solutions, for an undisclosed sum.

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