On Sunday, a number of NBC websites were hacked; with an individual or group that called itself "pyknic" having claimed the responsibility of the attack, which apparently had a possible link to the `Anonymous' hacking group.

A Sunday report from Deadline's Dominic Patten revealed that the `defacement' of the NBC site seemingly commenced under NBC's portal sites for Saturday Night Live, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. The defacement of the NBC entities was probably an upshot of the exploitation of a security flaw - by `Piknic' hacker - in the community software used for managing user's accounts.

Gradually, the hacking attack worked its way up to from the NBC entities to the main NBC page and the NBC video homepage; with the result that several segments of the overall NBC website were either defaced or were down for a few hours.

According to reports, the NBC-site defacement - also included a claim that the accounts and passwords of the users had been compromised - included part of a traditional Guy Fawkes Day poem that goes thus: "Remember, remember, the fifth of November / The Gunpowder Treason and plot."

Meanwhile, it took NBC a couple of hours to clean the defacement" of the affected sub-sites; and by 3:00pm EST on Sunday, the site had been restored; though some pages were apparently defaced again, while NBC made efforts to bring the sites up and running again over the course of the day.