Australian domain registrar and web host Distribute.IT on Tuesday informed customers who had sites hosted on a number of its servers that their sites and emails were now considered "unrecoverable".

Distribute.IT was hacked on Saturday in a "deliberate, premeditate and targeted attack", the company said. The company said the security breach was a deliberate attempt to take down the business by destroying drive header files and not an act aimed at stealing client data.

"At this time, we regret to inform that the data, sites and emails that were hosted on Drought, Hurricane, Blizzard and Cyclone can be considered by all the experts to be unrecoverable. While every effort will be made to continue to gain access to the lost information from those hosting servers, it seems unlikely that any usable data will can be salvaged from these platforms. In assessing the situation, our greatest fears have been confirmed that not only was the production data erased during the attack, but also key backups, snapshots and other information that would allow us to reconstruct these Servers from the remaining data," Distribute.IT said in its Web site on Tuesday.

"We have been advised by the team and the storage & capacity managers that we no longer have sufficient resources within the platform to transfer the 4,800 domains and accounts to other parts of the platform, and at this point we cannot undertake further provisioning of servers & accounts on the current infrastructure. This leaves us little choice but to assist you in any way possible to transfer your hosting and email needs to other hosting providers."

A report by the Register said that hacker group LulzSec took down the Distribute.IT. LulzSec over the past month has hacked Sony Corp., the U.S. Senate, an FBI affiliate, the Public Broadcasting System, gaming sites, and online porn sites. It said over the weekend that hack attacks will continue until "we're brought to justice, which we might well be."

Last weekend, Lulzsec posted 62,000 "random" e-mail accounts and passwords from users of Yahoo!, AOL, Comcast, Hotmail, Verizon, and Gmail, among others, that the group has illegally obtained. According to The Register, the data files appear to be cobbled together from a variety of sources, but the Australian email details include a number from Australian universities and government departments including AusAID, the Victorian Department of Childhood and Early Education and several local councils in NSW and Victoria.

LulzSec has gained support from Internet sectors as their attacks make victims aware that their sites are not secure, and, thus allow them to provide more firewalls before valuable information are obtained by other hackers. But the support has been waning as the hackers' victims have piled up.

LulzSec said Monday it is working with popular hacking group Anonymous and other groups for Operation Anti-Security. "Welcome to Operation Anti-Security (#AntiSec) - we encourage any vessel, large or small, to open fire on any government or agency that crosses their path. We fully endorse the flaunting of the word "AntiSec" on any government website defacement or physical graffiti art."