Danish websites hacked by cartoon protesters

STOCKHOLM - Suspected Muslim hackers have broken into around 600 Danish websites to post threats and protest against satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, an internet monitoring group said today.

If pages outside Denmark, where the cartoons first appeared, were included, then the hack attacks numbered around 1000, the Zone-H website (see link below) said. Zone-H tracks attacks on websites and listed the sites which had been hacked.

"Danish, you'r D3ad," one page said in garbled English.

The page had been added to a website run by photographer Thomas Jorgensen and below was a photo of a mannequin doll painted in the Danish flag and hanging from its neck.

"I will have to report it to the police," Jorgensen told Reuters.

Jorgensen, who did not know his site had been hacked, said he would also get in touch with the company that provided the server which hosted his website.

Other websites such as for left-wing progressive publisher Informationsforlag had a message in Arabic and a small English translation.

"Everything except our prophet -- Allahu Akbar -- Jihad is our way," the text said.

The websites appeared to be randomly hacked and did not necessarily have anything to do with the cartoons which have enraged Muslims around the world.

The websites listed by Zone-H did not include big Danish government websites or the newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which first printed the cartoons in September.

"What came out from the survey is what Zone-H very much expected: the use of the internet as an instrument to spread out cyber protests related to what happens in the worldwide context," Zone-H wrote.

Several groups of hackers from different Muslim countries had united to produce the greatest amount of damage to Danish and, more generally, Western web-servers, it said.

- REUTERS