Jul 19, 2011 07:31 GMT  ·  By

The notorious LulzSec hacking outfit has come out of retirement to hack the website of British tabloid The Sun and possibly other News International web properties as well.

People who visited the www.thesun.co.uk last night (UK time) were redirected to a fake news story about News International boss Rupert Murdoch being dead.

LulzSec took credit for the hack on their Twitter feed which has close to 300,000 followers. "The Sun's homepage now redirects to the Murdoch death story on the recently-owned New Times website. Can you spell success, gentlemen?" the group wrote.

Other News International websites also experienced problems while hackers suggested that the Sun attack is only the surface. "The real damage is currently giving the admins heart attacks," they said.

It seems that the company's DNS servers were hijacked which allowed the group to set up rogue redirects. For a time, the website redirected visitors to LulzSec's own Twitter feed.

The hacking outfit warns that this is only the beginning. "We have owned Sun/News of the World - that story is simply phase 1 - expect the lulz to flow in coming days," the group writes.

This means that we might see more attacks from LulzSec in the near future, particularly directed at News International, which seems to be the primary reason for the group's return.

"I know we quit, but we couldn't sit by with our wine watching this walnut-faced Murdoch clowning around," the hackers say.

After fifty days of seemingly random hacking that attracted a lot of heat from rival groups and law enforcement agencies, LulzSec disbanded and merged into Anonymous to assist the hacktivist collective's operations.

Last week, the group announced that it plans to come back for a one-time hit if Pastebin's Twitter account gets 75,000 followers. The account only has 16,000 followers so far, so that's clearly not the reason why LulzSec returned.