Lizard Squad hacking to find the 'truth' about MH370?

The mysterious hacking group is clearly highly-skilled, but what is their goal? Are they trying to uncover a global conspiracy or are they simply out to cause chaos?

The hackers who crippled the PlayStation and Xbox networks over Christmas, briefly severed North Korea’s internet connection and on Monday hacked the Malaysia Airlines website have threatened to reveal private customer data.

But are they – as some believe – a group of conspiracy theorists hungry for the “truth” about missing aircraft MH370, or simply teenage vandals?

If you visited the airline’s website you would have seen the message “Hacked by Lizard Squad – official cyber caliphate” and the rather tasteless “404 – plane not found”.

The latter is a reference to the error code shown when a website is not available.

There was also, inexplicably, a photograph of a lizard in a dinner suit, top hat and monocle, smoking a pipe.

Malaysia Airlines quickly tweeted to assure customers that “user data was secure”. But Lizard Squad insisted that not only did it have user data, in the form of stolen emails, but that it would soon "dump" it on the internet for all to see.

The airline assured customers in a press release that its website had not been hacked at all, and that only the domain name - www.malaysiaairlines.com – had been temporarily redirected to another site, the one containing the images and the 404 message. This would mean that the official website was always there, and totally secure, but that the addressing system which runs the internet was temporarily directing visitors to another page. One set up by the hackers for the purpose.