If you happened to visit Lenovo.com this afternoon you might've seen a random teen with an amazing haircut, wearing a headset, and posing for a webcam. This is no accident. It looks like the Lizard Squad hacked in and took over the homepage. It's a pretty funny hack, honestly.
As with any hack, it's hard to know exactly what happened so soon after the incident. Twitter lit up with reports of Lenovo's website being defaced a little before 4pm. A few minutes later, though, many of us at the Gizmodo squad weren't able to access the hacked page. However, one Gizmodo editor did and captured this screenshot:
And this one, too:
We were able to confirm the takeover by access a cached page via Google. In the source code, we found links to all of the images that were being displayed as a slideshow on Lenovo.com, while the song "Breaking Free" from High School Musical played in the background. There's also a link to a Lizard Squad Twitter account: @LizardCircle. The account doesn't take direct credit for the attack, but it does acknowledge it. The Lizard Squad also tweeted this a few hours before the attack:
The apparent attack on Lenovo comes less than a week after the computer company was caught installing adware that could steal private data on its laptops. This was a pretty evil thing to do, and Lenovo quickly released a tool to remove the adware. Nevertheless, Lenovo pissed off a lot of people, including some Lizard Squad pranksters. We've contacted Lenovo for more information about the incident.
GIF by Adam Clark Estes via Lenovo.com / Screenshot via Meg Neal