Kildare county board baffled by website attack

The Kildare County Board are still trying to get to the bottom of the cyber attack on their official website last weekend.

Last Sunday, the county's homepage was replaced with words under the heading "United Islamic Cyber Force, Jabhatul Nursa Baaqiyah". A song in Arabic was also part of the hack.

The website was quickly rebooted and restored to its original content but Kildare are at a loss to explain why they were targeted.

"Someone hacked it, we're not too sure who," said PRO Henry Barrett. "The hosting company are looking into it at the minute and we're waiting for them to come back to us. It just happened that on Sunday morning there was a blank screen apart from this message.

"Thankfully, we were able to get it up and running but it wasn't good to see on Sunday morning. We don't know whether it was some young lad having a joke or something more serious. I suppose some people got a bit of a laugh out of it but it could be a lot more than just that especially if you consider what was put on the website.

"We don't know why a GAA website would be attacked and that's why we initially thought it might be some young lad messing. We're just going to try and get a bit more information. The main thing is we have the website back up and running."

No authorities have been in touch with the county board about the incident nor have they received any apologies from their associates because of the security breach.

On Wednesday, French TV station TV5Monde was the subject of a cyber attack by pro-ISIS hackers and had to be taken off the air. Last month, the Dublin Rape Centre's website was affected by an ISIS hack as it used the software WordPress which had been hacked.