Hackers Attack Ahmadinejad’s Web site ....

Hackers Attack Ahmadinejad’s Web site...

By ROBERT MACKEY

. On Monday night in San Francisco an information technology consultant named Austin Heap reported on his blog that the official Web site of Iran’s president, Ahmadinejad.ir, had been attacked by hackers.

Mr. Heap, who has been active in the effort to provide Iranians with tools to circumvent Internet censorship this year, wrote that “someone seems to have had their way with Ahmadinejad’s web servers.” Although the Web site appears to be down now, Mr. Heap wrote that, for several hours, people trying to access it were redirected to a page which contained the following message:

Dear God, In 2009 you took my favorite singer - Michael Jackson, my favorite actress - Farrah Fawcett, my favorite actor - Patrick Swayze, my favorite voice - Neda.

Please, please, don’t forget my favorite politician - Ahmadinejad and my favorite dictator - Khamenei

in the year 2010. Thank you.

A screen shot of the Web page with that message is available on Mr. Heap’s blog (click on the first illustration there for an enlarged view of it).

In a later update, Mr. Heap wrote that the site was subsequently inaccessible, and speculated that it was “either intentionally pulled or … is simply being overloaded since so many people are looking to grab a peek at the hack.”

The apparent attack comes three weeks after a group calling itself the “Iranian Cyber Army” launched an attack that briefly redirected users of Twitter to a site that displayed a message that seemed to support Iran’s government. That message read, in part:

U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But They Don’t, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power.