Fake stories posted on Sony's Irish music website

THE IRISH website of Sony Music has become the latest of the company’s sites to fall victim to an apparent hacking attack.

Sony Music Ireland is investigating an incident yesterday in which fake news stories appeared on the site. One story claimed members of pop band The Script had died, while another claimed TV show The X-Factorwas "for the stupid".

A spokesman said the company was not commenting, adding that the stories that had appeared were untrue. The website, sonymusic.ie, was redirected to its official Facebook page, and other pages, including the news section, were taken offline.

Sony has been the victim of a number of attacks in recent weeks, although the previous attacks were more concerned with the details of customer accounts. Sony was forced to temporarily suspend its PlayStation Network and Qriocity services in April after details of more than 77 million customer accounts were compromised. A number of other attacks followed, with affiliate sites targeted in Canada, Greece and Thailand.

In June, Sony Pictures Entertainment confirmed some of its websites were breached.

The group that claimed responsibility for some of the Sony attacks, LulzSec, said last month it was disbanding after 50 days of “disrupting and exposing corporations, governments, often the general population itself, and quite possibly everything in between, just because we could”.

Other recent victims of hacking by various groups include the CIA, the International Monetary Fund and Lockheed Martin Corp.