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Primary school website ‘hacked’ and replaced with pornography

Online grooming

A Newry primary school has had its website “hacked” and replaced with pornography.

St Ronan’s Primary School was the target of the online attack at some stage over the weekend.

The school have confirmed they are working with the domain hosts in an attempt to remove the offending material.

The hacking came to light early on Sunday morning when a Twitter user raised the alarm, to which the school replied using the social media platform: “Unfortunately we got hacked and we are trying to have the site blocked”.

One user commented: “Your domain was not set to auto renew on 17th January 2019. As a result it has been registered to an organisation in Russia. GoDaddy registered it on their behalf. You need to call them and report the content and that you had been using the domain and what for.”

The school have informed the police of the incident.

Police said they investigated the matter.

A spokeswoman added: “Police received a report of an incident in relation to a website in the name of a school in the Newry area.  On further police investigation it was established that the lease for this website had expired and it was legitimately purchased by another user.

“This website is in no way related to the school.”

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