Intel was left red faced this morning after a sub-domain on its website was defaced by opportunist hackers.

A hacking group known as the Sm0ked Crew managed to deface an Intel sub-domain at talisman1.cps.intel.com leaving a short message greeting other hackers. Intel pointed out that the hackers failed to upload any HTML. The site is running Microsoft IIS4 on Windows NT4 - a combination that has been subjected to a raft of exploits in recent weeks.

Experts expressed surprise at the processor giant's apparent lack of web security. Security analyst Chris McNab, from MIS Corporate Defence, told vnunet.com that he believed the site had been compromised using one of the recently discovered IIS4/NT4 flaws.

He added that HTML transfer had been wisely barred on the server, but he was surprised that Intel had not taken its security more seriously, saying it would only take a short time to fix such known vulnerabilities.

"This was done by an opportunist who just happened upon a vulnerable server. It probably took 10 minutes to complete from start to finish," McNab said. "The exploit has been pointed at the vulnerable box and the hackers text has just been added on to the end of the command line, so it was echoed to the Index.html file. This just goes to show what can be accomplished by script kiddies as opposed to proper hackers".