In what may be a record of some sort, notorious hacker group World of Hell managed to deface 679 web sites in just one minute.

The defacement group hit the sites yesterday, and although very few of the names are instantly recognisable, such sites as computercrime.edu and americansurgicalhospitals.com were on the list.

One member of the group, named RaFa, seems to be taking responsibility for the hits, initially prompting suggestions that a single script had been used to carry out the defacements.

But the attacks are a good mixture of IIS on NT and Apache on Unix and Linux, suggesting that RaFa is either a little more clever than that, or that he simply used a couple of scripts, one for each system.

The defacer left the same message on all the sites: "WoH is back ! 0wning over +600 sites in 1 minute, cute record. & kiss my ass cause I just 0wned yours."

One security watcher from infosyssec.com said: "Six hundred and seventy nine is a pretty frightening number of defacements."

The full list of defacements has been mirrored on safemode.org, here.