Software giant Microsoft was left with egg on its face after its director of policy and enforcement for Microsoft's Xbox Live was hacked.

Stephen "Stepto" Toulouse is a high profile character because he rules on questions of appropriate behaviour on the service.  As a result he is not particularly loved by a certain type of player. Actually Toulouse is a nice enough bloke but he does make a few enemies because of his policies.

Now it looks like someone hacked him. His  personal website, stepto.com, and his Xbox Live account were in control of a hacker who claimed this was payback for having been banned from the Xbox Live service 35 times.

The hacker said that he socially engineered his way into the accounts. However Toulouse says the hacker convinced Network Solutions to point his DNS record elsewhere.

It isn't clear how the hacker got access to the Xbox Live account. It was all fixed by Sunday evening, but one wonders if Microsoft should do a little more to protect such a high-profile character from hacking.