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Microsoft admit they were hacked
Tuesday, May 25, 2004 at 18:07 by Laurence Norah
Speaking exclusively to I.T. Vibe today, Microsoft admitted that a portion of their UK website was compromised by hackers and defaced.

As can be seen from the screenshot below, the UK press site was replaced with text showing that the site was temporarily taken over by hackers calling themselves the "OutLaw Group". They also left a couple of books on the site, obviously as a dig at the site administrators, one on developing international software, and one on administrating Windows Server 2003.



This isn't great news for Microsoft, who have been pushing the security aspects of Windows Server 2003 hard. A Microsoft spokesperson gave us the following statement regarding the security breach:

"Microsoft has confirmed that a page on its UK website that relates to technical text books was briefly replaced by unauthorized content on Monday May 24th.`Microsoft UK quickly regained complete control of the targeted page and is currently investigating the incident."

The spokesperson went on to say that Microsoft do not believe that any customer data was jeopardized as part of the attack. However, for a firm constantly pushing customers to update their Operating Systems with the latest patches and to stay abreast of the latest anti-virus updates, this attack, rumoured to have taken advantage of a months old flaw in Windows Server 2003, is a bit of an embarrassment all round really.

Hopefully they'll learn their lesson and we'll see less of this sort of thing in the future, but we have a suspicion this may not be the case.
 
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Comment # 1 on 31 May 2004 at 06:37 by bootsy
oh man , these hackers have nothing else better to do than attack microsoft press website . .such a cheap hack ..

Comment # 2 on 10 June 2004 at 00:20 by ReDuX
cheap, yet high profile...

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