Telegraph downplays site hack

The Telegraph has said that 'no damage was done' after a site defacement of two of its subdomains.

A spokesperson for the Telegraph Media Group (TMG) told ZDNet UK on Friday that the Telegraph had picked up the site hack, which was reported by Sunbelt Software on Thursday, in a scan.

"There was an incident of attempted sabotage on a third party hosted TMG site," said the Telegraph spokesperson. "This was picked up by our daily security scans and remedied shortly after and no damage was done. TMG takes the security of the website and all third party sites extremely seriously."

The TMG spokesperson declined to give any technical details of the hack, or to say whether any malicious code had been embedded in the defaced pages. ZDNet UK understands that the subdomains are administered by third parties.

Christopher Boyd, writing on the Sunbelt blog on Thursday, said the Shortbreaks and Wine and Dine pages had been hijacked by an individual or group calling itself "R.N.S. – Romanian National Security".

The hacker(s) posted a message which said:

“We are sick and tired of seeing how some "garbage" like you try to mock our country. [And try] to create [for us] a completely different picture compared to the real one, and calling us "romanian gypsies" [,] broadcast s****y tv programs like TopGear."

The Guardian, reporting on the story on Thursday, said that the hack could be the work of one person with a grievance against the Telegraph. The Guardian pointed out that the Telegraph site had been hacked in March 2009.