Crackers deface Burger King Web site

The UK Web site belonging to fast food franchise Burger King was hacked and defaced yesterday by crackers who apparently prefer the taste of food at arch rival McDonalds.

The group claiming responsibility for the attack -- Dreamscape -- replaced the Burger king homepage at www.burgerking.co.uk with a mockup of McDonalds' UK Web site.

Burger King's original homepage boasts that its burgers contain 40 percent more beef than McDonalds'. The defacement carried the less flattering message: "Eat our food, we want your money," and advised visitors to go to McDonalds instead. McDonalds has had its fair share of trouble with computer crackers, however. Last month its own site was hacked and defaced.

The Burger King URL was originally just redirected to a page hosted at http://www.dreamscape2k.net/, which has since been removed.

Kevin Black, vice president of computer security company E-Security, says that although this sort of defacement is getting ever more common, it still sends out the wrong message to consumers.

"E-commerce, certainly on a consumer level, is getting crippled by fears about security," he said. "Of course it would be much worse if this was a bank, but this shows that we haven't got it right yet."

According to the German-based Web page defacement archive Alldas.de, the Burger King site functions using the Windows NT operating system. Alldas reports that 51 percent of all defacements occur on Windows NT systems, while Linux systems follow on in second place, accounting for 22.89 percent of all successful attacks.

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