A Lenovo Shop In Beijing
A customer (L) checks a new laptop with a salesman at a Lenovo shop in Beijing December 13, 2010. Reuters/Christina Hu

Lenovo’s website has been hacked. As of this writing, there is a message sitting on the website that states that it is down because system maintenance is under process. A group of hackers called “Lizard Squad” claims to have carried out the hack attack on Lenovo’s website.

ZD Net claims that the Domain Name System (DNS) was hacked at 4 PM Eastern time. However, it was restored at 6:30 PM, but the site remained inaccessible after that. At that time, instead of displaying home page with product listings, the site showed a slideshow of some teenagers with the song “Breaking Free” from High School Musical running in the background.

Clicking on the slideshow directed users to the Twitter account of Lizard Squad. The source of the website contains a note with the names Ryan King and Rory Andrew Godfrey, the members of Lizard Squad.

ZD Net says that original Lenovo has not been hacked by Lizard Squad. Instead, they have attacked the URL of Lenovo.com that directs website visitors to a server that belongs to the hackers.

In the previous week, Lenovo was heavily criticized about infecting malicious adware called Superfish on consumer PCs. According to The Next Web post, the Superfish adware comes preinstalled on numerous consumer laptops from Lenovo.

It has been found that Superfish shows third-party advertisements on search results on Google without the consent of the user. Superfish was found to be affect web browsers like Internet Explorer and Google Chrome. Lenovo has been criticized for not taking the issue seriously even when security officials informed it. However, it has announced that it will not ship Lenovo systems with Superfish software. It is has also provided a tool to the user that allows them to get rid of the malicious program.

It is speculated that the hack attack on Lenovo’s website is a reply from Lizard Squad to the Superfish incident. In December last year, Lizard Squad had attacked the Xbox and PlayStation networks. On its Twitter handle, it also claims to have attacked Google Vietnam.

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