PBS Hacking: Tupac is alive and well ... or is he

Contrary to popular belief American rap start Tupac is alive and well after being discovered in New Zealand, a number of media reporter.

Or so a group of hackers would like to have you believe.

A hacker group unhappy with a US public broadcasting system (PBS) documentary on WikiLeaks hit back by hacking its servers, posting thousands of stolen passwords, and also adding the fake news story to the site.

A PBS staffer, Teresa Gorman, told people this weekend via her Twitter account that the story was a fake. In fact, TuPac died in a 1996 shooting in Las Vegas.

But the false story was indexed by search engines and and spread rapidly through Facebook and Twitter, even after PBS pulled it down.

Again, our site has been hacked - please stay with us as we work on it, read one of the Newshour's several tweets responding to the incident.

The attackers were a group called Lulz Security, which runs a twitter feed called the Lulz Boat. Besides defacing the site, they also posted the passwords and logins of the PBS affiliates.

We just finished watching WikiSecrets and were less than impressed. We decided to sail our Lulz Boat over to the PBS servers for further... Perusing. the group posted to an Internet forum.

On May 24, Frontline aired an hour-long documentary, WikiSecrets, that profiled suspected WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange criticised the piece before it aired.

The group says the show was hostile, misrepresented WikiLeaks' views and tried to build an espionage case against him and Manning.

Earlier this month Lulzsec hacked Sony's Japanese website, and before that Fox.com, where the group stole and posted 363 employee passwords, the names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of 73,000 people who had signed up for audition information for the upcoming Fox talent show The X-Factor.

The group doesn't appear to be looking for financial gain, just mayhem, noted an analyst from security firm Sophos labs.