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Microsoft website hit by hackers group
Sunday, December 14, 2008 By Dick O’Brien
Microsoft Ireland has been forced to review its online security after the company’s Irish home page was hijacked by a group of hackers last week.

Visitors to the microsoft.ie website last Tuesday were greeted with a message saying that the page had been hacked by a group calling itself the Terrorist Crew.

A spokesman for Microsoft Ireland said that the incident was being investigated by the Gardai but it was unable to release any information on whether there were any leads on the identity or motives of the hackers. The hijacked web page listed the online nicknames of seven members of the group. Web searches reveal that several members have claimed credit for numerous hacking attacks on corporate websites in recent years.

While some hackers do have financial motives for attacking websites, many attacks are little more than acts of vandalism intended to prove that their perpetrators have the prowess to breach security systems at high-profile firms. Microsoft stressed that none if its own systems had been compromised by the attack.

The company’s Irish internet domain is hosted by a third-party company, which redirected web traffic from the Irish address to its main corporate website, microsoft.com.

The spokesman said that the hacker group had managed to breach security to redirect traffic to a web page of its own creation.

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