Over the weekend, the Linux Mint website was hacked to offer malicious iso file downloads to anyone who tried to download the distribution. After being the victim of multiple intrusions, the Mint team completely disabled the entire linuxmint.com domain temporarily.
The hackers altered the links on the download to download an iso of Linux Mint that contained malware called Tsunami: a relatively simple IRC bot that is used for DDoS attacks. The actions of the hackers makes it appear as if they are unexperienced because they did little to hide their actions and did not use the control they had to do much that would benefit themselves.
For a more detailed timeline, check of this article from Softpedia.
More information can be found about the attacks on the Linux Mint blog.