BONG! ITN web site hacked! BONG!

Video footage sales site does slo-mo disaster recovery - BONG!

A public-spirited reader tipped us last night that something bad had happened to the home page of itnarchive.com, which is the video footage selling business run by British TV news outfit ITN.

At itnarchive.com, it says here, you can get "news and feature footage from all ITN’s output on ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, together with the entire Reuters television archive worldwide and, in the UK, the historic French Pathé library."

Well, somewhere in the region of 24 hours or more after our informant also alerted the owners about the defacement of the site, it was still up there. It said: "f*ck USA Government f*ck PoizonBOx" (in so many words, that is).

According to ITN, itnarchive.com has opened an office in New York, in which case goodness only knows what they've been up to today. In the UK it's a holiday, so one begins to suspect which side of the pond the techies are based on, and which web operations might not actually have an effective 24x7x365 disaster recovery strategy in place...

But in the short space of time it's taken to write this piece, the loves have apparently managed to get out of bed and pull the plugs on the servers. Seems .org and .net have gone as well. Now we've just got to get them back up with the right data on them and the holes plugged... ®