On the heels of reports that it recently had slowed down peer-to-peer traffic during peak hours, Comcast (News - Alert) Corp. this week faced a hijacking of its Web site by computer hackers, according to news reports.

 

Hackers took over Comcast’s Web portal for several hours overnight, leaving a strange message on the site that the company’s millions of clients use to get technical support, news and even their own e-mail messages.

 

According to postings at BroadbandReports.com that Yahoo’s news service cited, the front page of Comcast.net was infiltrated shortly before 11 p.m. last night and a note was left there saying that hackers had “RoXed” Comcast.

 

Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said late Thursday morning that the problem had been solved, but some users were still unable to access Comcast.net and Web-based e-mail, according to news reports.

 

The unusual episode dovetails with increasingly bitter feelings between the U.S. cable broadband giant and some Internet users.

 

Two weeks ago, about a month after vowing to produce better network management techniques, Comcast and Cox (News - Alert) Communications were found by the Germany-based Max Planck Institute for Software Systems to be slowing down BitTorrent traffic at peak times.

 

The study used more than 8,000 nodes worldwide to test for BitTorrent (News - Alert) blocking, according to a New York Times article.

 

Cox was interfering with 100 percent of the BitTorrent traffic at 1 a.m., 4 a.m. and 5 a.m., according to the tests.

 

The study also found that Comcast interrupted at least 30 percent of BitTorrent upload attempts around the clock.

 

Comcast had announced in March that it would work with the company named BitTorrent to come up with new network management techniques, according to the Times.

 

No one knows just who hijacked the company’s Web site overnight.

 

It didn’t appear that e-mail or other private information was compromised, Comcast said. The hackers appeared to have seized control of the Comcast.net domain name at registrar Network Solutions (News - Alert) Inc. and redirected it to other servers, Khoury said, according to reports.