This article was taped for WSEE/WICU 12 News for Erie Pa on June 8, 2015:
12News/See News was first to report on Sunday that the website of Sacred Heart Church was hacked, by what appears to be a radical Islamic group in Algeria. For those who tried to check the Sacred Heart Church website on Sunday, it was a pretty surprising sight. Hackers claiming to be El Moujahidin from Algeria, not only compromised the site, sacredhearterie.org, they replaced it with their own and as of Monday evening, their radical messages were still there.
So why was Sacred Heart? We've learned they weren't really the target. We enlisted the web experts at Epic Web Studios and here's what they found. The hackers infected a server used by the church's web hosting company and once inside, used malware to infect open source "WordPress" sites running on the same server. That means Sacred Heart was one of hundreds or thousands affected.
"It seems like it's a targeted attack," said David Hunter, managing partner of Epic, "but it wasn't, it just happened to be that it was a church website, it was really just the nature of that system, WordPress, being that it's open and anybody can go download it and look at that code, it allows for positive and negative things to take place."