SOME say it was an act of evil.

On the Queen's Birthday long weekend, a Melbourne IT company's hard drives were hacked and thousands of files and websites erased. Today that company, Distribute.IT, is dead - its business and reputation so trashed that its owners were forced this week to sell it to a competitor. Thousands of small Australian businesses whose websites it hosted are picking up the pieces.

The hacker obliterated 4800 websites in a lightning nighttime strike upon Distribute.IT