Part of the Daily Telegraph's website has been hacked, apparently by people in Romania who were aggrieved at its identification of "gypsies" and "Romanians".

Its "Short Breaks" and Wine And Dine sections were both hacked, with the Short Breaks site still up at 12.55pm today, with a picture of a Romanian flag claiming to be for the "Romanian National Security", some comments in Romanian and the remark in English at the bottom that "Guess what, gypsies aren't romanians, morons." It also links to a Russian site which plays an MP3 called The Lonely Shepherd.

Sunbelt Software, which first noticed the hack, said that it had alerted the Telegraph when it noticed the hack.

The method used to hack into the site is not known. Chris Boyd, a researcher at Sunbelt, said that a translation of the text from the page says that the hackers are "sick of seeing garbage like this ... calling us Romanians 'gypsies'." It also attacks Britain for "broadcasting shitty TV programs like Top Gear".

But Boyd said that the group is apparently unknown even among Romanian hackers – suggesting that it may be one person with a grievance against the Telegraph.

In March 2009 the Telegraph's system was also hacked, exposing the email addresses of registered users on part of its site. That hack also seems to have been done by a Romanian hacker – suggesting that the site has become a target.

A later posting in May on the Hackersblog site suggested that there was a weakness on the Telegraph site that allowed it to be hacked repeatedly.