Microsoft appears to have had its Indian web store broken into and user login credentials stolen by Chinese hackers.

Tech site "WP Sauce" reported on Sunday that the group: http://www.wpsauce.com/2012/02/breaking-microsoft-store-india-hacked.html , which goes by the name Evil Shadow Team, managed to deface the web site, posting an image of a V for Vendetta mask and the message: “Unsafe system will be baptized.”

At the time of writing the site had been taken offline: http://www.microsoftstore.co.in/ , presumably while Quasar Media, the third-party digital media firm Microsoft employed to run it, figures out what went wrong.

“The Microsoft Store India is currently unavailable. Microsoft is working to restore access as quickly as possible. We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused,” the holding page message reads.

According to multiple reports, punters' logins and passwords were also stolen by the hackers, a situation made significantly worse because Quasar apparently made the schoolboy error of storing them in plain text.

Not much is known about Evil Shadow Team, although a link posted on the defaced Microsoft Store page on Sunday takes the user to the group’s blog: http://ps.s.blog.163.com/ , written in Chinese and titled “7z1’s blog”.

Users of Microsoft Store in India have been advised to change their passwords on the site as soon as it comes back online, and to change their credentials on any other sites if they used the same ones across multiple online accounts.

Microsoft has yet to respond to a request for comment.

(ElReg)