In an apparent response to terrorist attacks on America, a notorious hacker known as "Fluffi Bunni" defaced potentially tens of thousands of high-profile Web sites, replacing their home pages with a rant about religion, capitalism, and violence.

Officials at NetBenefit, a London-based Internet services provider, confirmed that the attacker infiltrated the company's domain name servers (DNS) this morning and re-directed thousands of customer sites to a page created by the attacker. The page, which displayed Fluffi Bunni's trademark photo of a pink toy rabbit at a computer keyboard, featured a title tag that read "We're Coming for you Oslahmamama" and text saying "Fluffi Bunni Goes Jihad," according to Security.nl, a Dutch security information site that captured a mirror of two of the defaced sites. NetBenefit chief executive Jonathan Robinson told that the firm's NetNames unit provides domain name services to approximately 100,000 customers, including Gillette, Barclaycard, The Guardian, News International, Guardian Direct, Bank of Scotland and members of the Virgin Group. Robinson said "the majority" of those sites were re-directed to the attacker's page for at least one hour this morning, before the breach was detected and NetNames administrators took the DNS servers offline briefly prior to restoring normal service. The Dutch version of the UK-based Scoot search engine as well as the Internet homepage of Reed Exhibitions Netherlands, a member of the Reed Elsevier Group, were among those defaced, according to security.nl. Robinson said NetNames is still investigating how the attacker was able to penetrate the firm's DNS servers. Domain-name servers are used to direct requests for Web site addresses to the proper Web site hosting servers. As such, today's attack did not directly affect any data stored on NetNames' DNS customers' servers, according to Robinson.