Visitors to both the Arabic and English versions of the Al-Jazeera Web site on Thursday were greeted with an American flag and a pro-U.S. message, the work of an apparent online vandal.

The controversial Middle Eastern news service was the victim of a domain hijacking. The actual defacement appeared on a free Web site service provided by NetWorld Connections. Technically known as a "redirect," the hack causes Web browsers that attempt to go to www.aljazeera.net--as well as the English site--to be surreptitiously redirected to the content hosted on NetWorld's servers.

The service detected a spike in traffic early this morning, and an e-mail from a security specialist confirmed that visitors to Al-Jazeera were being redirected to NetWorld's service, said Ken Bowman, CEO of the Salt Lake City company.

"We pulled down the content immediately," Bowman said. He added that VeriSign, which administers the domain registry, eliminated the redirect later in the morning. "They never even touched (Al-Jazeera's) site," he said.

A representative of VeriSign couldn't immediately answer questions regarding how the domain had been hijacked.

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