Sony's Irish music site attacked

There was speculation today that Sony Music's Irish website has become the latest of the company's sites to fall victim to attack.

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

A spokesman said the company was not commenting on the incident, but said the stories that had appeared on the site were untrue.

The company's website, sonymusic.ie, is currently redirecting to its official Facebook page, and other pages, including the news section, have been taken offline.

It is not yet known who is responsible for the incident.

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 that some of its websites were breached in a new attack on its servers.

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.