In a clear instance of rise in cyber crimes, some unidentified hackers hacked web site of open source organization, the Apache Software Foundation, compromising the SSH key of the web server widely used for remote administration.

The incident, which brought down the company's operations for several hours, was first reported by Trend Micro senior security advisor Rik Ferguson.

Ferguson wrote in his technical blog: "It is worth remembering however that a compromised SSH key led to in-the-wild exploitation of Linux based systems exactly this time last year, for the purposes of installing rootkits."

Hackers uploaded Trojanised code files to minotaur.apache.org and accessed the server using SSH key authentication from the third party host. The incident assumes significance as most of the web servers are linked with Apache.

The blog states, "To the best of our knowledge at this time no end users were affected by this incident, and the attackers were not able to escalate their privileges on any machines. While we have no evidence that downloads were affected users are always advised to check digital signatures where provided."