Hackers replaced the home page of an interagency federal Web site with a diatribe against the war in Yugoslavia on either Thursday night or Friday morning.
The home page of Recreation.gov, which normally serves as a one-stop site for information about recreational activities run by the federal government, was replaced with a short essay criticizing NATO efforts to stop "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo.
The Interior Department, which maintains the site, pulled the plug on Recreation.gov mid-morning Friday. An Interior Department source said the site's administrators were investigating the hacking incident.
In their diatribe, the hackers identified themselves as "f0bic, nostalgic, cellbl0ck, jay."
"In France they had a chance to kill Milosevich [sic], but they didn't. Stop This War. No more innocent people have to be sacrificed for a cause that is ineffective," the hackers' page on Recreation.gov said.
Several other federal Web sites have been hacked by politically motivated groups in recent years. In March 1997, NASA's home page was replaced with a document decrying the commercialization of the Internet. In 1996, the Justice Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Air Force all had their home pages replaced in what appeared to be unrelated incidents.
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