An Irish university website that fell victim to cyber sabotage over the weekend has been temporarily withdrawn from the Internet. Mischievous hackers wiped out the authorised content of the University of Limerick's homepage and added their own studiously juvenile text.
Intriguingly, the letters TCD were in large white type at the top of the page, together with the advice, "stay in skool kidz". Then, between intermittent gobbledegook, readers were alerted to its potentially offensive content.
It was lucky they warned us, because elsewhere the Internet interlopers showed they meant business with the subversive words "vendetta", "shroud", "the science krew" and, er, "frog". In a statement, Mr Gordon Young, head of the information technology department at the university, said the site, "along with a number of other organisations", was unofficially replaced by another page sometime between 2 p.m. on Saturday and 4 p.m. on Sunday.
"The university is now examining its logs to try and ascertain who made the changes. The official website will be made available as soon as it has been secured," he said.
A Trinity College Dublin spokeswoman said many websites, including Telecom and the Cork Institute of Technology, had experienced similar invasions recently. She said the hackers were not necessarily associated with Trinity College, despite the college initials on the site.