The scandal surrounding the Murdoch Empire, and especially its UK arm News International, continues to run apace with the emergence of what appears to be a WikiLeaks-esque site dedicated to showcasing leaks on the subject in MurdochLeaks.
The site and associated Twitter account are blank as of now, and the domain registration is privacy-hidden, but the site may become the repository for the rumoured 4GB worth of emails reportedly acquired by LulzSec hacked the News International Servers. The group managed to not only redirect The Sun‘s website to their Twitter feed, but also implant a story onto The Times‘ and The Sun’s websites (archive) about the death of Rupert Murdoch due to a Palladium overdose, and then hack the News International DNS servers bring down all their 1,024 sites. The group have since published the contact details and usernames and passwords from a variety of top News International executives and editors including the recently arrested Rebekah Brooks.
The MurdochLeaks.org domain was registered on 13/07 a full five days before the LulzSec hacks were reported, and so may have nothing to do with the hacks but instead intended to be an index of any leaks that become available by an independent source, but we will have to wait and see what the project becomes over the coming days.
#UPDATE# 21:00 23/07
MurdochLeaks has gone live and appears not to have anything to do with LulzSec as they state:
We are not affiliated with, condone or endorse hacking or any other forms of black hat j35t3r hacktivism
Now writing jester as “j35t3r” will not stop people believing the site is the work of the hacker group, but they claim to be a serious organisation looking for “tips or evidence of wrong doing relating to Rupert Murdoch’s affiliated institutions…We do not accept rumor, opinion or material that is publicly available elsewhere.” They go on to note that they will not publish any documents themselves but rather share it with a network of journalists and law enforcement agencies in the UK, US, and Australia.
They also promote the use of anonymising tools such as onion proxy/router Tor and encryption such as PGP to send documents in order for any whistleblowers to maintain their privacy – something anyone leaking information should be using at a minimum.