Websites for two News Corp newspapers, the Sun and the Times, have suffered an Internet attack.

Last night visitors to the Sun's home page at the sun.co.uk were redirected to the Twitter feed for Lulz Security, or LulzSec, a hacking collective that said it had disbanded late last month.

The rerouting has since stopped, and the Sun's web page has been restored.

The website for the Times isn't working this morning although there is no redirect to another site.

MSNBC.com reported that another hacking group, Anonymous, had taken down this site.

News International, the News Corp unit that owns both newspapers, said the company was aware of the attack on the Sun website.

"Our technical teams are working on it," said Daisy Dunlop, spokeswoman for News International in London.

Lulz Security's Twitter account, @LulzSec, is known for its distributed denial-of-service attacks, which can bring down websites by flooding them with thousands of service requests a second.

The group's account has more than 300,000 followers. Lulz Security operates anonymously and doesn't have listed contact information.

The attack began after hackers posted a fake obituary for News Corp chairman and chief executive officer Rupert Murdoch that said he had "ingested a large quantity of palladium".

Before being sent to the Lulz Security Twitter feed, visitors to the Sun's website were redirected to Mr Murdoch obituary.

Bloomberg