All Philippine government offices have been asked to step up web security after the main information website was targeted by hackers.

A spokesman said:

“We are alerting all government agencies to review and improve security of their websites in view of the hacking of the website this afternoon.”

It is said that best practices will be adopted to reduce vulnerabilities in order to combat cyber crime. The main info site was down for a number of hours and Google had indexed the text ‘hacked by 7z1’ and was showing it up in results pages.

The motives of the hacker were not explained by the Phillipine government.

Anyone visiting the Belvoir Castle website on Friday would have been greeted with a black page bearing the Algerian flag.

The website had been hacked late last week with Arabic text placed instead of the usual content. IT experts have since struggled to repair the homepage although much of the rest of the site had been restored.

A spokesman was baffled as to why they had been targeted.

“It happened on Friday afternoon and we’ve had our IT chap working to try to fix it.

“We’ve nothing to do with Israel or the Middle East, I just help to organise the teddy bears’ picnic.”

An Indian hacker has been released following an order from a magistrate. The man in question, Hari Prasad, had been jailed seven days ago after proving how easy it was to rig an election that made use of electronic voting machines.

The magistrate said that Hari had made a strong statement and served his country well through his actions. The man had demonstrated flaws in electronic voting machines to academics and had been highlighting problems rather than exploiting them. However, police said that he hadn’t been arrested for his demonstration, but for where he had acquired the machine from in the first place.

Cook to Perfection, a Kings Lynn cookship, has had its website brought down by hackers only two months after setting it up. The business was voted ‘best cookshop’ in British retailer awards and its website was specifically mentioned as part of this recognition.

However, the company director, Alastair Done, has found that the website is currently offline.

“I was going to use our website to do some work and it came up with a big error. Somebody’s gone in and deliberately deleted every single file. We have the database – which is good for us – but what we don’t have is the framework that that database goes onto, so it’s as good as useless.”