A group of suspected Tunisian hackers defaced the website of the popular text editor Notepad++ on Monday. The site stated that not the Muslim world, but the West is responsible for millions of deaths.
The reason for the defacement was a recent version of Notepad++ that the French developer called ‘je suis Charlie’. He did this out of sympathy for the victims of the bloody attacks in Paris last week.
The administrator has since taken the site offline, but Google’s cache shows that the hackers call themselves ‘Tunisian Cyber Resistance’. They write that they criticize the developer’s action, because the West causes many deaths in Muslim countries. “Our message is clear,” they write. “Don’t think of playing with us. We defend our messenger. We defend our religion.”
On Google+, the developer confirms that the site of the popular word processor has been hacked. He says that he is currently working on a solution and also emphasizes that the automatic typing of Notepad++ after installation is not malware. “This is not a virus, but a way to express my support for Charlie Hebdo and free speech.”
Notepad++ is an extensive text editor with various features that are especially useful for programmers, such as syntax highlighting for C, C++, Java, html, xml and php, among others. The program also offers the possibility to edit more than one document at the same time and even maintain one document in two different places. The program is still available for download via SourceForge.