Swedish hackers foil the CIA.

The CIA may have had electronic listening devices to pick up troop movements in Vietnam, but it was forced to pull the plug on its Web site last week, after Swedish hacker group Power Through Resistance vandalised it.

According to CIA officials, surfers searching for the agency's pages were led to the vandalised Web site which had been relabelled 'The Central Stupidity Agency'. The words 'stop lying' were displayed in a large typeface, along with other disparaging remarks.

More worrying for users, the vandalised site had links to protocols that apparently render Internet service providers open to attack. It also had links to Playboy and hacker sites.

US officials said that the hackers had not accessed any classified intelligence on the agency's mainframe computers. Although the CIA is trying to play down the incident, a task force has been set up to look into the attack.

The site, which has now been removed from the Internet, contained links to unclassified information, including press releases and other reference work.