A Brazilian cracker crew took home the dubious honors in Sunday's Web defacing contest, a worldwide attack that, for the most part, fizzled.

According to the Defacers Challenge Web site, which is back up and running after being pulled down last week by its hosting service, the Perfect.br gang racked up 152 points, about 2-1/2 times the score of the second-place hackbsd crew.

Points in the Defacers Challenge, which security experts traced to groups in Brazil and Hong Kong, were awarded based on the number of sites defaced, and operating system used by the sites' Web servers. Sites running on Windows, for instance, counted for just a single point each, while those hosted on servers using the rarer Macintosh or HP-UX tallied five points each.

Sixty-five groups participated--or at least scored one or more points--in the contest, which was widely publicized in the days leading up to Sunday's assault.

While the results were certainly far short of the "apocalyptic" that one security expert claimed last week as possible, the defacers did "tag" a number of small Web sites around the world.