Kevin Mitnick, the famous hacker who spent five years in jail after breaking into the systems of several tech companies, had a few of his own websites defaced by hackers over the past few days. On each site, the homepage was replaced with a sprawling missive about the lameness of hacking, sex with Mitnick's grandmother, and shoutouts to friends, all sprinkled liberally with "fucks." Also, there's a picture of Mitnick with a crude penis drawn onto his forehead and cum on his hands and mouth. (You can see a screengrab of the page here.) Funny and newsworthy, but how should a reputable tech news site cover the incident?

Some sites, like InfoWorld, simply state that Mitnick's front page was "replaced with a vulgar message."

CNET News interviews Mitnick about the vandalism. (He says "Of course, it is embarrassing to be defaced—nobody likes it.") More interesting, though, is how they describe the scene:

The message placed on Mitnick's Web site started with: "ZMOG!! THE MITNICK GOTZ OWNED!!" and continues with expletives and a picture of Mitnick with some modifications.

The Register was a bit more explicit:

The sites defensivethinking.com, mitsec.com, kevinmitnick.com and mitnicksecurity.com (which all run on Linux, incidentally) were defaced with offensive messages that said "hacking was for homos", among other things. We'll leave it to psychologists to say what that message says about the perps of the attack, but irony obviously isn't their main stock in trade.