Bury Borough Council's website was defaced at the weekend by a group of hackers calling themselves the Silver Lords.

A spokeswoman for the Greater Manchester council confirmed that the website was down for most of the weekend, but said she was unable to make further comment. The site, which was defaced with a number of slogans including "Admin.: ISS is sUx, and one Apache is rulez man", was returned to normal by Monday afternoon.

According to information posted on a mirror of the hacked site, the hackers exploited a flaw in Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0, the same flaw used in the attack on Boots' website last week.

Boots was the latest in a line of high profile websites running Internet Information Server 4.0 or 5.0 on NT4.0 to have been hacked. According to attrition.org, which mirrors compromised websites, last year NT was the most hacked system.