http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/06/msuk_hacked/
By John Leyden
6th July 2005
Microsoft's UK web site was defaced late on Tuesday night with a
message in support of Venezuelan hacker Rafa. Defacement archive
Zone-H reports that well-known defacer Apocalypse hacked into
Microsoft's UK web site (microsoft.co.uk) and uploaded a picture with
the message "FREE RAFA - HACK IS NOT A CRIME" (recorded in an archive
here [1]).
The site has since been restored to normal operation and the offending
GIF removed. A Microsoft spokesman said it was aware of the attack,
which technical staff are investigating. "There is no reason to
believe customer data or any other sensitive information has been
compromised," he said. Although somewhat embarrassing all early
indications are that the attack was not serious.
Apocalypse has been targeting US institutions and the government sites
for months, always posting messages in support of Venezuelian hacker
Rafael (Rafa) Nunez-Aponte, a suspected member of the World of Hell
hacking crew. Rafa is in custody in the US following his arrest in
Miami in April over a series of alleged attacks on US Department of
Defense servers dating back to 2001.
Previous targets of Apocalypse's "digital graffiti" attacks have
included Stanford University (archive here) and US Navy web sites.
Zone-H reckons that misconfiguration of Microsoft's UK web server
permitted the latest attack. For the record, Microsoft's UK site runs
Microsoft's IIS 6 web server software on Windows 2003 servers. ®
[1] http://www.zone-h.org/en/defacements/mirror/id=2531794
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