Cyber attack: LulzSec go for twofer hacking U.S. Senate and Bethesda Softworks

The loose-knit hacking collective LulzSec, which is responsible for numerous recent attacks on several big-name games developers including Sony and Nintendo, yesterday released two statements on its website claiming responsibility for successful cyber attacks against the U.S. Senate and Bethesda Softworks.

The U.S. Senate

The hacker group LulzSec's most recent attack targeted the U.S Senate's website. The group reported that the attack happened over the weekend. Like it did for its other attacks, LulzSec has since posted the data it stole on its website.

In the post LulzSec boasted that it had managed to break into a public portion of the Senate's website. The U.S. Senate has since issued a statement stating that the group did not manage to breach the firewall protecting the more sensitive portion of the network.

LulzSec's post indicated a possible motivation for its attack as being the U.S. government's recent policy of treating all cyber attacks in the same way it would a real-world attack -- meaning that any attack by a foreign power could be seen as an act of war.

LulzSec subsequently stated its disaffection for the U.S. in general, going on to mock the country's new policy on cyber attacks:

"We don't like the US government very much. Their boats are weak, their lulz are low, and their sites aren't very secure. In an attempt to help them fix their issues, we've decided to donate additional lulz in the form of owning them some more!

"This is a small, just-for-kicks release of some internal data from Senate.gov - is this an act of war, gentlemen? Problem?"

Bethesda Softworks

In addition to its attack on the U.S. Senate's website, the group also claimed responsibility for a successful cyber raid on games developer and publisher Bethesda Softworks. Bethesda is responsible for several award winning games including, Oblivion: The Elder Scrolls IV, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and most recently Brink.

The attack reportedly targeted the company's servers and was carried out two months ago. LulzSec claimed that it had managed to take over 200,000 Bethesda customers usernames and passwords as a result of the hack.

LulzSec cited its reason for posting the data as to show its superiority over other "groups" that had reported flaws in Bethesda's most recent title Brink:

"As of late, certain inferior sailing boats have discovered flaws in Brink (brinkthegame.com), thinking themselves exciting and new.

"Some weeks ago, we smashed into Brink with our heavy artillery Lulz Cannons and decided to switch to ninja mode.

"After mapping their internal network and thoroughly pillaging all of their servers, we grabbed all their source code and database passwords, which we proceeded to shift silently back to our storage deck.

"Please find enclosed everything we took, excluding one thing - 200,000+ Brink users. We actually like this company and would like for them to speed up the production of Skyrim, so we'll give them one less thing to worry about. You're welcome! :D"