14 DAY TRIAL // The French experts at Microsoft had somewhat of an unwanted surprise on Sunday. While they were serving a "petite croissant" and a "petite cafe" their site was the victim of a massive redesign. In other words it had suffered what is known as Web site defacement. The hacked site displayed for a period of time messages from the hackers before it was completely taken offline.
Microsoft confirmed that the Turkish hackers had taken control of the site because of a miss-configuration of a third-party's web servers that hosted the site. After the successful attack the hackers posted a message addressing the site's administrator: "Hi Master (: Your System OwNed By Turkish Hakers!" and then identified themselves as: "redLine & rudeb0y & Ejder & The_Bekir & SaCReDSeeR & ASH owNed you!"
The group that hacked experts.microsoft.fr used the handle TitHack and are credited with over 1.600 web site defacements, their predilect target being Windows-based servers. In the message displayed on the site they threaten that Microsoft.com will be next.
"We apologize if customers are inconvenienced by the unavailability of the affected Web site," Microsoft said. "Microsoft is committed to helping protect our customers and we're working diligently with the third-party hosting company to restore the functionality of this Web site as soon as possible."