Earning a footnote in the annals of computer vandalism, a lovesick hacker known as "flipz" on Tuesday became the first person known to have defaced one of Microsoft Corp.'s Web sites. The hacker, who also altered a handful of government Web sites in recent days, says he expects to be arrested soon. "Its (sic) all about fun till the feds bust down the door," said a message left on one of the defaced Web sites.
A Microsoft spokesman said early Tuesday that he was unable to confirm the attack on the company's Conference Management Server site, but the defacement was documented by attrition.org, a reliable computer security site that maintains an archive of hacked Web sites. (MSNBC is a joint-partnership between Microsoft and NBC News.)
Representatives of two government Web sites hacked by "flipz" -- the Department of Veterans Affairs and the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico -- confirmed that attrition.org's account of the vandalism of their sites was accurate.
Part love note, part threat
On Monday, the hacker replaced Microsoft's Conference Management Server home page, which was not accessible Tuesday morning, with a message that was part love letter and part threat, attrition.org reported.
"flipz was here and f0bic, your seksi (sic) voice helped me through the night," it read in part before concluding with a threat against Microsoft CEO Bill Gates.
B.K. DeLong, curator of the attrition.org Web defacement archive, said research of other hacking mirror sites -- which use a computer's "screen grab" function to document vandalized Web sites -- indicates that this is the first time Microsoft has been victimized.
"This is the first time that we've been publicly notified (about a hacking claim against Microsoft) ... and to build our mirror we borrowed mirrors from other sites," he said.
All of the recent hacked pages were accessed through Microsoft NT servers, attrition.org said.
Other sites affected?
The hack appeared to impact a series of Internet domains Microsoft maintains outside its standard corporate presence on the Net. As of Tuesday morning, at least six sites registered to Microsoft weren't functioning, though some may have been removed prior to the hack.
While most Microsoft corporate site IP addresses start with 207, the hacked page started with 131. On Tuesday, all Microsoft sites between 131.107.65.0 and 131.107.65.20 weren't functioning. These likely were all hosted on the same server, which apparently was offline.
The impacted Web pages appear to be conference information sites, including "icassp.microsoft.com," "isys.microsoft.com," and "cuai-97.microsoft.com." Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known.
A prominent target
Microsoft has long been a prominent target of hackers. The 2600 Web site, the online home of a hackers' magazine, has the Redmond, Wash., company prominently listed on a page of "Hacked Sites of the Future."
