Someone has discovered a problem on Microsoft’s MSN.com website and the question is being asked, “is a prelude or even the result of an attack on Microsoft’s website?”

The problem is with MSN’s Arabia subdomain. MSN uses subdomains to provide localized content to different parts of the the world. There are MSN subdomains for the UK, France, India and so on. There is also a subdomain for Arabia at http://arabia.msn.com. The problem occurs when users of the site try to access Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

On other subdomains and the main MSN.com website, entering a search term into the Bing search box takes you to the Bing search engine and a page of results for the term entered. But on the Arabia site using Bing results in an error. The error comes in two parts, the general error is “You are not authorized to view this page” and the reason given for this is “Forbidden: IP address of the client has been rejected.”

The problem was dsicovered by Dr. Jahangiri and he is calling on Microsoft to fix this problem quickly but to also check their MSN Arabia website to ensure that it hasn’t been compromised and also to check for any other vulnerabilities in the web server configuration.

[Via Press Release]