AOL laid low by hackers, again

Once is unlucky, twice is careless...

AOL has admitted its ICQ instant messaging servers have been hacked for the second time in five months.

ICQ users were greeted with a taunting message to systems administrators from hackers as they tried to access one of the community pages at www.icq.com on Monday.

The home page was defaced by a hacking group calling itself Silver Lords and in a separate incident was attacked by Men In Hack (MiH) which added a different defaced page to the same server.

According to reports, AOL said the electronic defacement vulnerability was quickly patched and no user data was compromised.

A group called 'InSaNiTy ZiNe c0rp' previously defaced the ICQ interest groups site in February of this year.

The free, peer-to-peer instant messaging software ICQ ("I Seek You") was launched in 1996 by Mirabilis, and bought by AOL in 1998.