A teenager searching online for a church’s phone number discovered its website had been defaced by pro-ISIS hackers, when an Islamic State recruitment video took over her screen.
The words “You have been hacked by the United Cyber Caliphate” flashed across 15-year-old Elizabeth Storteboom’s computer screen Friday, when she clicked on a link to the Lamont Christian Reformed Church’s website. Then an old ISIS recruitment video popped up and began playing.
“We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses and enslave your women by the permission of Allah, the Exalted,” ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani al-Shami says in the captioned video.
“It just started playing, and I was reading the bottom, and it was talking about crazy things,” Storteboom told a local Fox outlet. “I called my dad in, and said he needs to see this. I covered the camera, because I was super scared there for a second.”
The 137-member church is located in Lamont, Michigan. The banner and video remained on the site through Saturday afternoon, when the site was fixed.
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The church has contacted the FBI, but is not sure whether it was just a prank or who really hacked into the site. The same group published a “kill list” of U.S. State Department employees Monday, and have conducted a slew of other cyber attacks in the name of ISIS in recent years.
Storteboom told Fox17 church continued as usual on Sunday, although the incident scared some attendees.
“They were pretty freaked out,” she said. “One of my friends said they didn’t think a lot of people were going to show up today, and then the doors opened during service and they said like six people turned around and were getting freaked out. One of my friends said it had bombing threats in it or something.”
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